Closed Circuit (Focus Features, 8.28) is an intelligent, moderately suspenseful, British-made melodrama (and not really a “courtroom drama”, despite what some reviewers are saying) about domestic terrorism and morally derelict higher-ups. The latter prove their dastardly mettle in Act Three by pursuing the once-romantically-linked barristers (Eric Bana, Rebecca Hall) who are onto the Big Secret that no one can know about…all right, no spoilers. But the fact that these two get chased down some dark streets underscores the basic movie maxim that (a) if you stumble onto some Really Shocking Information and (b) indicate that you may spill it, the bad guys will definitely try and ice your ass.
“Inside Llewyn Davis is a sardonically funny American art film about frustration and wintry despair and the Sisyphusian struggle of a folk singer who’s talented and cares about his art but isn’t good or lucky enough to make it to the next level, and the week-long journey he goes through that takes him from a kind of semi-resigned ‘fuck me’ slumber mentality to an ‘oh, to hell with it…this shit is infuriating…I hate folk music!’ feeling. Bob Dylan, trust me, is going to love this thing. He’s going to effing swear by it.” — posted from Cannes on Sunday, 5.19.
Last Monday I tapped out a piece called “Brand Name Preferences,” and the next day I wrote some of my journalist pallies looking for responses. The two best responses came from Indiewire‘s Anne Thompson and Gold Derby‘s Tom O’Neil. But first a portion of my letter to these guys:
“What I wrote on Monday is a description of the essence of what’s wrong if not malignant concerning the Hollywood awards-following community — when faced with a choice between STANDING UP FOR THE REALLY WOWSER EXCEPTIONAL PERFORMANCE THAT DESERVES AWARDS ATTENTION (at least in the early stages between now and, say, late November or better yet December) and hanging back and going “YEAH, OKAY, BUT IT WON’T WIN OR EVEN GET NOMINATED BECAUSE A FEW BRAND-NAME ACTRESSES HAVE A BETTER SHOT”, too many of you guys almost ALWAYS choose the latter. You’re birds sitting on the fence going “caw! caw! caw!”
Yesterday I posted a praise piece about Adele Exarchopoulos‘ wide-open, mesmerizing performance in Blue Is The Warmest Color (IFC Films/Sundance Selects, 10.25). I called it “Historic Performance, All-But-Guaranteed Best Actress Nomination.” This morning Awards Daily‘s Sasha Stoneposted the following in the comment thread: “[Exarchopoulos getting a Best Actress nomination is] certainly possible…but the one to really look out for is Brie Larson in Short Term 12. If anyone is going to break through big-time this year, it will be her.
Blue Is The Warmest Color star and Oscar hopeful Adele Exarchopoulos.
Short Term 12 star and possible Oscar contender Brie Larson
Hollywood Elsewhere disappeared yesterday around 3 pm Eastern because a mild-mannered guy named Paul Karkas, compliance manager for a Toronto-based domain wholesaler named Tucows.com, shut down the HE domain due to my having failed to update information in Hollywood Elsewhere’s WHOIS registry, specifically my ancient email address (which used to be gruver1@earthlink.net) and my old land-line number which I bailed on three or four years ago.
Tucows compliance manager Paul Karkas.
Yesterday afternoon and evening I left several urgent messages with the Tucow guys, not only Karkas but the company’s CEO Elliot Noss, pleading with them to please take Hollywood Elsewhere off their domain punishment list. Tucows doesn’t have an after-hours helpline and has zero interest in dealing with people like me — they’re a wholesaler and interface only with other companies with whom they’ve partnered or may partner. Nonetheless they were holding the cards and so I wore out my index finger placing calls to them.
James Toback and Alec Baldwin‘s Seduced & Abandoned, which screened this morning at the Salle Bunuel, is a doc that basically says that it’s harder than hell to raise money to make a mid-range or a somewhat lower-budgeted character-driven film unless your marquee elements (stars, action scenes, FX) are directly marketable to a lowest-common-denominator audience in international communities. Which we know going in. It also says it didn’t used to be like this in the ’60s and ’70s and even part of the ’80s, but everything has changed these days for the worse. Which we also know going in.
Last week Vulture guy Kyle Buchanan mentioned something about Neil LaBute‘s Some Velvet Morning being a kind of comeback-resurgence film and possibly his best since In The Company of Men (or something like that). It will screen three times at the Tribeca Film Festival, which begins on Thursday, 4.18. It sounds like a major event — a film that may all but erase memories of The Wicker Man and restore LaBute’s rep as a master conveyor of fear and loathing between the sexes.
Alice Eve, Stanley Tucci in Neil LaBute’s Some Velvet Morning.
But this isn’t a good year for me to attend Tribeca (I can’t afford it) and Steve Beeman of Falco Ink is telling me that the Velvet Morning guys won’t be allowing any Left Coast critics or columnists to see it concurrently via DVD screeners or a limited digital viewing window of some kind. That’s a real shame. They’re presumably afraid of piracy but a limited digital streaming option for favored journalists doesn’t seem like much of a risk to me. So if I want to catch it next weekend I’ll have to fork over $1200 or so and probably more.
“Young and beautiful Velvet (Alice Eve) is enjoying a relaxing morning in her New York brownstone when Fred (Stanley Tucci) interrupts,” the synopsis reads. “With suitcase in tow, he enters the apartment with great expectation. Not having seen or heard from Fred in nearly four years, Velvet is clearly surprised. As Fred unloads the reason for his resurfacing, the history and nature of their relationship is revealed. The weight of their reconnection becomes clear as tension mounts and their chemistry reaches its climax.
“Writer/director Neil LaBute continues his exploration of male and female relations in this enigmatic relationship drama. The use of natural lighting and handheld camera highlights the dramatic realism for which LaBute is known. Both lead actors give electric performances, Stanley Tucci as the manic, ego-crushed older man, and Alice Eve, the dazzling ingénue. Their nuanced performances, paired with LaBute’s dialogue, create an intriguing drama with a stunning finale.”
Update: The only thing that gives me pause is the fact that Velvet is a porn-star name. What semi-upstanding parents would name their daughter Velvet? Any woman who would self-name herself Velvet would do so only to enhance her reputation among oily guys who pay for it. Woman: “Hi, my name is Velvet Kowalsky and I’m applying for the marketing position with your company.” Employer: “Uhm…your name is Velvet?”
Remember that line in Woody Allen‘s Husbands and Wives in which a business colleague was telling Sydney Pollack to call a certain lady of the evening, in part because “she has a mouth like velvet”?
And by the way, what “young and beautiful” blonde 20something who isn’t holding down a senior executive-level position with a major corporation can afford to live in her own “New York brownstone”? At best somebody like Velvet might be able to afford a share…maybe. On her own she might be able to afford some small, moderately dumpy apartment in Brooklyn or Queens.
Author, former Variety guy and renowned cineaste Joseph McBride has revealed that he’s written George Stevens, Jr., with whom he co-wrote several AFI tribute specials in the ’80s, and told him he’s wrong about having contributed to the presentation of his father’s western classic, Shane, in a 1.66 to 1 aspect ratio on the forthcoming Warner Home Video Bluray.
“I have written my former writing partner George Stevens, Jr., to share my concern about how the Shane Bluray release is chopping off parts of the film. This obviously must not be done.
“Patrick McGilligan and I interviewed Stevens in 1974, [and during that discussion] Stevens talked about the importance of deliberate pacing and editing.
“‘It’s related to music or painting, the arrangement of film, and it has an enormous effect on an audience,” McBride quotes Stevens saying at one point. “They never relate to it as being devised, any more than I presume I’m seduced because Renoir devises the composition of what he shows me in a painting. I know he sweated it out, erased it, but he got it. There’s no question about it, there’s the grand man.
“‘It surprises me how well audiences, also critics, reward a film that has that kind of thing in mind, by design, not because it just happened. Sometimes we find really fine quality in a film by looking at it, looking at it, and then looking back at it — why, this darn thing’s designed as the Bolero is designed!”
McBride concludes that “this was a man who took great pains over every aspect of his work, including composition. I am sure he would be appalled to see Shane cut down to 1:66 again when it could be released in the Academy ratio in which he shot it.”
Portion of actual letter from McBride to Stevens, Jr.: “Since your father composed Shane so painstakingly and beautifully in 1:33 (I remember vividly him telling me how he achieved the great composition of Shane framed within the antlers of the elk in the opening of the film), I would not see any value in changing that original ratio for home viewing, even if your father had to go along with a cropped widescreen version for early theatrical engagements during that first all-encompassing craze for widescreen.
“I have seen your father’s 35mm print projected on theatrical screens three times (once by your father himself in Madison the first time I saw the film at the University of Wisconsin, in 1966), and it was carefully preserved (indeed spectacular-looking) and in the 1:33 ratio.
“I have seen recent frame comparisons between Shane at that ratio and Shane at the 1:66 evidently planned for Bluray, and it seems clear that important visual data would be lost if the film were cropped again to 1:66, no matter how carefully and no matter whether it were to be done frame by frame. Your father’s great compositional sense would be at risk here, in my opinion. This great film would be diminished.
“I would hope at least that you could influence Warners to release both the 1:33 versions and the 1:66 versions on a Bluray set so viewers can choose to watch it either way. There may be some of the usual arguments about the public expecting to have their TV screens filled, but I recall how we went through all that when even the clips for AFI Life Achievement Award shows had to be panned-and-scanned, but later the industry and the more knowledgeable segment of the public (the segment that values and reveres classic films) learned to accept black bars at the side to preserve a film’s original 1:33 ratio.”
“Shane Carruth‘s Upstream Color is the only Sundance film I’ve seen so far that totally jettisons narrative in favor of an impressionist, oddly spooky, catch-as-catch-can paint-splatter whatever experience. It’s very cool and commanding and climatorial. I became an instant fan. You’re free to piece together all the fragments and good luck with that, but Upstream Color has something to do with 21st Century anxiety, malevolent micro-manipulation, love, bodily invasions, Ridley Scott-like worms and definitely pigs. Lots and lots of little pigs.
“You don’t want to hear what I think it all amounts to. Whatever I might write would just get in the way or feel like a mosquito. It’s entirely between you and Upstream Color.
“Director-writer-producer Carruth is self-distributingUpstream Color on April 5th. HE readers are advised to grapple with the experience. All serious cineastes, I mean. I honestly don’t think you’ll be able to call yourself a man if you don’t.
“It’s certainly worth catching for Amy Seimetz‘s mesmerizing lead performance. And Carruth’s costarring one, come to think. They play lovers (named Chris and Jeff) who may have been invaded/afflicted by the same quietly malevolent, William S. Burroughs-ian bad guys, and Carruth is cool — a fascinating actor in that he doesn’t seem to “act” much but is indisputably interesting. His intense eyes especially.
“But Semetz (an indie actress-director who strongly resembles early Juliette Binoche) is the shit. She’s the primary victim, the person who struggles with weird micro-aggression and malevolence that makes no real “sense,” who tries to hold on, who bears the burden and somehow muddles through. Seimetz has been around for years, but this is the first time I’ve sat up and said ‘wow.'”
Portion of Dargis review: “For all of Mr. Carruth’s cosmic reaching and despite the jigsaw montage, Upstream Colorisn’t an arduous head-scratcher if you don’t worry about what it means and just go with the trippy flow. (Mr. Carruth helped cut and shoot the movie, and wrote its mood-setting score.)
“It is, instead, a sometimes seductive, sometimes tiresome melange of ideas that are by turns obvious, hermetic, touching and sweetly dopey. Much of it involves an emotionally fraught romance that Amy Seimetz’s Kris strikes up with Mr. Carruth’s Jeff, a relationship that dovetails with a freaky tale of dead pigs, blue orchids, those mind-altering worms and another mystery man, Sampler (Andrew Sensenig), whose mailbox bears the words ‘Quinoa Valley.’
“You may laugh, but if that’s an intentional joke, Mr. Carruth isn’t saying. He’s a man of few words and less exposition, and Upstream Color doesn’t come across as satirical even if it edges close to absurdity. Sampler is similarly taciturn and is mostly seen walking about recording sounds, like the papery rustle of dry leaves and the happy gurgle of streams. He also tends to his swine and conducts a shivery, creepy deworming procedure with Kris and a pig.
“At times, he walks among people as undetected as the soulful angels in Wim Wenders’ Wings of Desire. In one scene, he drifts among his adorable herd of little porkers Christ-like, the fingers of one hand trailing through the air as the camera closely follows, a shot and a gesture that strongly evoke Mr. Malick’s work.
Mr. Malick’s imprint on Mr. Carruth, however deliberate, runs deep. It’s evident in Mr. Carruth’s emphasis on the natural world; his use of ‘Walden’; the hushed voices and many images, including some time-lapse photography of a dead pig decaying underwater, which registers as the catastrophic inverse of the time-lapse sequence of a seed sprouting underground in Days of Heaven. (Mr. Carruth’s movie at times feels like days of hell.)
“Mr. Malick’s influence also extends to shots of Kris and Jeff walking, whispering and touching that are not moored in a specific time but could be from the past, present or future. In these Malick Moments, time becomes as circular as the rising and setting of the sun. ‘Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in,’ Thoreau wrote in ‘Walden.'”
I finally saw Harmony Korine‘s Spring Breakers last night. I didn’t believe a frame of it but then I’m not supposed to, right? It’s such a thoroughly cliched erotic fantasia about crazy-ass hot-bod chicks (three Tarantino-dream-fantasy sluts and one half-sensible lapsed Christian) and gun-fellating and orgiastic Fellini Satyricon boning and snorting around and Florida gangstas flashing their guns and braggin’ ’bout their “sheeyit”…I mean, like, uhhm…why? Oh, I get it. Don’t ask.
I was imagining a Godzilla-sized Charlton Heston dressed as Moses, rising hundreds of feet out of the ocean and blotting out the sun and pointing at these skanky, well-toned scumbags and bellowing “whoa unto thee…!!!” Or maybe Jim Hutton as Moses.
I wasn’t bored but I was wondering if Korine had anything in mind other than trying to create fantasies about where college-age kids are at these days in order to…I don’t know, imply something about how slippery and nihilistic it’s all become out there and or to vaguely get himself off in the vein of Larry Clark?
He clearly hasn’t the slightest interest in trying to assemble a film that might reflect how it would really be if four sociopathic lassies in their late teens or early 20s were to somehow scrape some dough together and drive down to Florida, etc. Most women I know like to pick and choose and not just drop to their knees in front of their first ape they see. As best I can tell Korine is having himself a whimsical wank, and we’re meant to get off as best we can or at least laugh along the way or whatever.
James Franco is clearly laughing at the asshole he’s playing (his character is named Anus or Asswipe or something like that), especially during that scene in which he sings a Britney Spears song. Scarface playin’ on his flatscreen in a continual loop…”mah sheeyit!” I was kidding about the name — he’s called “Alien.”
If there’s some kind of subliminal, half-sincere social commentary woven into this thing it’s suspended between “look at these impossibly stupid empty chicks and the things that really matter to them” and “look at the bods on these girls and how they’re into standing on their heads in motel hallways and how they’re all ready to swallow salami at the drop of a hat.” Or something like that.
Spring breakin’ as a lifestyle, a constancy, a never-ending place in your head, a philosophy…somewhere between a duel and a place in the sun.
At least it has one great sequence — two masked girls going into a diner and screeching and waving a gun around and taking everyone’s money, but shot from the POV of the getaway driver as the camera watches the action through windows and with the sound muted as the car slowly drives around.
Remember when 15 or 20 Columbians attacked Tony Montana‘s Miami fortress with automatics and shotguns? It was quite a battle but eventually the Montana forces lost. These days you don’t need 15 or 20 Columbians to wipe out a drug gang. All you need are two college girls with two big-ass pistols and super-size magazines just blastin’ away, expending hundreds of rounds and never catching a bullet themselves.
“All my life when I have seen more than two men together I have seen foolishness and I have seen cruelty,” Mary says about the disciples of her martyred son. “But it is foolishness that I have noticed first.”
For some reason this line woke me to what I believe is probably a very sincere longing on the part of many strong women today. They don’t just want more economic opportunity and increased power in business realms. They don’t want just a fair and equal voice in civic and cultural affairs and in government. With ample justification they feel genuine contempt for the way men have been running things over the last several centuries, and they’d like to basically take over and run the show their way and get it right. They want to live under a sane, less warlike and at least a semi-rational matriarchal society. I swear to God the older and wiser I get the better this idea sounds.
If a fundamental matriarchal power-grab would mean replacing bullheaded pistoleros like John Boehner and Mitch McConnell and the nihilistic Republican Congresspersons who don’t have a constructive or a fair-minded bone in their bodies and who would rather pull the temple down on everyone’s head than accept reasonable solutions then bring it on. And anything else you can throw in. Women are crazy in their own ways, of course, but they couldn’t mess things up any worse than Boehner and the rightie wackos have. Hillary Clinton or Elizabeth Warren winning the White House in 2016…you name it.
Postscript: I have only one nagging hesitation about what I just wrote. I worked under exec producer Linda Bell Blue at Entertainment Tonight in ’98, and it was the most horrifically political and terrifying work environment I’ve ever known in my life. It was all about petty office power games and anxiety and who’s up and who’s down. Nothing in that environment was the least bit calm or serene. It was all about performing in front of your co-workers in order to convince them that you wouldn’t say anything bad about them when they weren’t around. Women were always conferring in their offices with the doors closed, and the subject was always other women who were huddling in their offices, etc. I naturally wanted to keep getting paid but I hated it there. Half the time I wanted to take gas so I wouldn’t have to deal with all the bullshit. I was 40% upset when I was canned but 60% relieved.
If I were you I’d copy and paste the names of all the Metacritic reviewers who’ve given Park Chan-wook‘s Stoker a 70% or better. Then I’d do the same with the Rotten Tomatoes reviewers who gave it a thumbs-up. And then arrange their last names alphabetically and print the list and tape it to your refrigerator door or…whatever, paste it on your Notes app on your iPhone.
Because anyone who gives any kind of pass to Stoker is either smoking something or eating something they shouldn’t or I-don’t-know-what. Either they have a liking for the kind of oppressively flamboyant style that screams “oppressively flamboyant style!”, or they’ve decided that directors who present characters who wallow in cruel or deeply perverse behavior are themselves deliciously perverse (and that critics who get and/or celebrate this are extra-hip), and that anyone who directs by way of Brian DePalma-on-steroids has to be cool because…well, because he/she has lots of nerve! That or the critic is overly liberal or charitable. Either way I would henceforth regard them askance.
If by clapping my hands three times I could somehow erase this kind of lunatic, high-style, absurdly over-telegraphed approach to murder-and-revenge melodramas from the face of the earth and then send it to hell and into a pit of snarling, salivating dogs, I would clap my hands three times. If you’re any kind of fan of Alfred Hitchcock‘s Shadow of a Doubt, or if you have the vaguest respect for the basic premise (perverse Uncle Charlie and his teenaged admiring niece who “gets” Charlie on a certain level) and what a clever, resourceful writer and director could potentially do with it, you’ll find it damn hard not to be appalled by Stoker.
I love Andrew O’Hehir‘s line about it being “The Addams Family meets The Paperboy.”