“Sundance movies have devolved into a genre [and are ] getting as predictable as Hollywood’s,” writes Time‘s Richard Corliss. “The style is spare and naturalistic. The theme is relationships, beginning in angst and ending in reconciliation. The focus is often on a dysfunctional family (there are no functional ones in indie movies) that strives to reconnect. Within this genre are a few subspecies: the family breakup film (The Squid and the Whale), the finding-your-family-at- school movie (Half Nelson, Brick), the gay drama (Mysterious Skin). Way too frequently, the family goes on a trip. Given the typical Sundance pace, which is leisurely to lethargic, these road movies rarely get in the passing lane.
“The predictability of recent Sundance films is a pity, because the fest used to discover original movie minds. The honor roll of those who introduced their early work there includes both the big fish of indie cinema (among them Joel and Ethan Coen, Jim Jarmusch, Kevin Smith and Darren Aronofsky) and some of the mainstream’s champion swimmers (including Steven Soderbergh, Quentin Tarantino, Bryan Singer and Christopher Nolan).
What most of these directors share is a gift for bending, sometimes gleefully mutilating, film form: taking old narratives styles like the crime movie or musical or horror film and making them fresh, vital, dangerous. The subjects could be familiar — amnesia in Nolan’s Memento, obsession in Aronofsky’s Pi — but when the story was told in reverse, or turned into a weird thriller, the narrative ingenuity became bracing and delicious. They were different from Hollywood — and different meant better.
“You don’t find as much originality in Sundance films these days, and for a simple reason. In the beginning, the festival was a home for the homeless, for a rambunctious outlaw take on filmmaking. There was no need to be cautious, since indie films were rarely hits. But as Sundance became the showcase for a form of movie-gaining marketplace pull, young directors naturally made films to fit the new mold. Sundance films weren’t quirky; they did quirky. Quirky became another genre.”
The Bourne Ultimatum (Universal, 8.3) looks like the one truly exceptional threequel due out this summer. (How can it be otherwise with Paul Greengrass directing?) But which of the other five will be the worst? I’m sure there are deeply-held opinions.
My money, naturally, is on Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End — another superdooferus Gore Verbinski wankbuster that’ll look terrific and will be about absolutely dead frickin’ nothing except the major participants getting richer. (Will a certain columnist who loved Dead Man’s Chest write after seeing this new one, “Ecstasy! My heart is fluttering with joy!”?) One comfort factor: the presumed return of Bill Nighy as Davy Jones.
Perhaps I shouldn’t underestimate the potential tediousness of Spider-Man 3, the trailer for which makes it look like the Spider-Man version The Empire Strikes Back, with Kirsten Dunst being the lead supplier of Yoda-like “beware of the dark side!” warnings.
Shrek the Third will be harmless. Ocean’s Thirteen — a Sting-like revenge-against- Andy Garcia story — may actually be half-decent. And Brett Ratner‘s Rush Hour 3 will almost certainly be glorious.
Time‘s Richard Corliss has written that “the trifecta of threequels is crucial to Hollywood’s health.” My first reaction to this was the opposite — they’re crucial to feeding the Hollywood disease. But if the big three Threequels are profitable enough, they’ll bring in the bucks that will help cover the shortfalls on artistic- gamble films like Children of Men and others….and that’s a good thing.
A couple of months ago I mentioned the snob syndrome among the elite big-city film writers. I said “there’s something vaguely arid and ingrown about this culture…a certain tendency to sidestep films with what an elitist would describe as plebian emotionalism.” And now here’s Time‘s Richard Corliss elaborating on this aversion as a prelude to a thumbs-up review of Darren Aronfosky‘s The Fountain.
“Movies critics can’t agree on much, but there’s one assumption most of them hold deeply without ever discussing it. It’s that a film that says life is crap is automa- tically deeper, better, richer, truer than one that says life can be beautiful.
“That’s a 180 from the prevailing notion in classic Hollywood, where optimism was the cardinal belief, at least on-screen. (It was in the front office that the knives came out.) Most movies, whatever their genre, were romances; they aimed for tears and ended with a kiss. But to serious critics then, and to the mass audience now, sentiment is suspect. Feeling is mushy, girly — for fools. To be soft- hearted is to be soft-headed.
“So critics will see a horror film with extreme violence, or (less frequently) an erotic film with extreme sex, and accept these as genre conventions, whether or not they’re grossed out or aroused. But a movie that tries to make them feel is some- how pandering to their basest or noblest emotions and, as they see it, deserves a spanking from any smart reviewer. These days, nothing is as easy to deride as dead-serious romance.”
“I’m not saying John Cameron Mitchell‘s Shortbus is up there with Citizen Kane or Drunken Master II,” says Richard Corliss in a Time essay called “Meet the F–kers.” “It’s mostly clever, sometimes meandering. And I have to say I didn’t get all that jazzed by the many gay exertions (or the straight ones).”
Really? I thought the sequence with Paul Dawson leaning upside down against a wall and blowing himself was right up there with the Odessa Steps sequence in Sergei Eisenstein‘s Battleship Potemkin.
“But I was, critically speaking, excited to see the coherent integration of explicit sex scenes into a naturalistic story film,” Corliss continues. “Mitchell said that in press interviews here, he was asked over and over, ‘Why sex?’ I wonder: What took so long? Most people laugh and cry; most people have sex, occasionally at the same time. Sex isn’t divorced from our own emotional biographies; it’s an inextricable part of it.
“So I applaud Mitchell. And I say to other intrepid filmmakers: Just do it.” — critic Richard Corliss in his 10.6.06 Time piece called “Meet The F–kers.”
I respect Shortbus also for blending tangible emotional fibre with downtown Manhattan sexuality and hormonal urgency, blah, blah, and I too wish there would be more sexuality and less overt violence in movies, etc. And I laughed at the singing menage a trois scene. But the truth is that I was bored — vaguely bored — during a lot of Shortbus, and moderately repelled by some of the sexual footage.
Repelled partly because of Mitchell’s dp, Frank G. DeMarco, using overly bright lighting on all that white blotchy skin, and partly because I miss the kind of sugggestive, carefully lit scenes of skin and out-front sexuality that were part of Hiroshima Mon Amour , the 1959 Alan Resnias film, and Ingmar Bergman‘s 1963 film The Silence.
I know, I know…get with Mitchell and DeMarco’s blotchy white skin program and get in step with the 2006 program. But I don’t want to live in a cinematic world of shrugs, yawns and popcorn and leg-stretching breaks in the lobby .
Time‘s Richard Corliss goes kind of easy on M. Night Shyamalan and Lady in the Water. Or gets oblique or sheathes his sword or something. You could cherry-pick the critical parts and call this a hit piece, but it reads to me like Corliss and his editors heard the wolves snarling for Nights’ blood and decided to try to cut him a break by writing and structuring the piece just so.
Despite the understandably relieved announcement by Superman Returns naysayer David Poland that five big-name critics have joined him in panning Bryan Singer‘s film (the San Francisco Chronicle‘s Mick LaSalle makes six), the Rotten Tomatoes ratings are a bit more than 75% positive — 72% cream-of-the-crop, 77% overall — so there’s no turning of the tide. You just have seven sourpusses standing off in the corner along with the seven dwarves, Seven Brides for Seven Brothers and the seven deadly sins…no biggie. Enthusiastic thumbs-uppers include N.Y. Daily News critic Jack Matthews, Newsweek‘s David Ansen (who says “from the start of this gorgeously crafted epic, you can feel that Singer has real love and respect for the most foursquare comics superhero of them all”), Time‘s Richard Corliss, Entertainment Weekly‘s Owen Gleiberman (enthusing that it “gets tighter and fiercer as it goes along…Singer does his grandest work to date”), the Atlanta Constitution‘s Eleanor Ringel Gillespie and so on.
Boiled Down
Movie City News editor David Poland saw United 93 last night (I know because I saw and spoke to him at the screening), and he has asked two questions on his Hot Blog about it: What is it really about and who is it really about?
The answer to the first question isn’t that simple, but the answer to the second is as plain as a green apple sitting on a glass table in a nice restaurant in the late afternoon.
Director Paul Greengrass during filming of United 93
United 93 may have been made with the “idea” of it being about the heroism, selflessness and standing-up-to-terrorism valor shown by the passengers on flight #93, but honestly, actually…? The passengers in the film are mainly reacting to a realization that the hijackers are on a suicide mission and that they’re basically all dead, and so the bravest among them say “screw it, let’s do something instead of just waiting for it.”
This kicks in toward the very end, but the movie is really not about that (and thank God it isn’t) because, as Poland says, the drama is never delivered on any kind of individual character level. A kind of frantic heroism happened, an undeniable valor, but the film isn’t about that. Well, it is…but not finally.
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Director Paul Greengrass may have begun with the idea of developing a heroism-of- the-passengers story, but I think he said along the way, “Sod it…let’s just make a minute-by-minute, you-are-there, this-is-how-it-probably-felt movie from the POV of the United #93 passengers and the perspective of the professionals charged with keeping tabs on commercial plane activity…and then we’ll sort it out in the editing room.”
And yet the movie has, ironically, a big current running through it.
This current, for me, is Greengrass’s big inspiration, his brainwave. Because it’s the first two thirds of this film — the experience and the perspective of the people trying to keep tabs on what’s happening from the air control centers — that gives United 93 its intrigue and electricity.
What, then, is United 93 “about”? It’s about revisiting, recapturing, reanimating… living through the particulars. Which means that Poland will be chasing his own tail around a tree trying to find the Big Meaning…unless, of course, he breaks through all that.
The theme of United 93 is the deceptive nature of “reality” as it unfolds. The reality of what life in these particular spaces felt like, and Greengrass’s striking ability to reconstitute recent history with a feeling of gripping verisimilitude, which I regard as a kind of cinematic theme or belief system in and of itself.
In short, I believe in Paul Greengrass when he’s working at the top of his form. As far as this movie is concerned, that’s my religion and my faith. Nobody needs a high falutin’ analysis about “what it’s really about” to make it feel whole or justified, because what it’s about is its own constitution. A big resounding echo isn’t the point in a film composed of a thousand echoes of minutae.
Poland also asks who is it really about?
That’s the really interesting question, and the answer is that United 93 is about us. Then and right now. Us.
Greene Grab
Blown Away
Is Paul Greengrass’s United 93 (Universal, 4.28) a knockout, a time-stopper, a mind-blower? It sure as hell is.
You’re probably going to need to stand outside the theatre for a few minutes after it’s over and just chill…trust me. And then you’re going to want a drink, even if you don’t drink. And then talk it out with friends for an hour or so. See it with some. Don’t go alone.
Is feeling power-drilled all over again by one of the worst real-life nightmares of all time a good thing? To me, it is.
Christian Clemenson (kneeling) as Thomas Burnett in the middle of passenger huddle during last act of United 93; Cheyenne Jackson, as Mark Bingham, is standing behind with the maroon shirt and hat.
It happened, it’s real, and this film knocks your socks off because it takes you right back to that surreal morning and that feeling, that almost-afraid-to-breathe feeling, and to me, that’s partly what good films do — they lift you out of your realm and make you forget about everything but what’s on-screen.
All I know is that I was watching and taking it all in, and that the old feelings started to build and churn around and then pour back in, like a damburst. The chills and forebodings of doom were back, and this time with a closer, more comprehensive perspective.
United 93 didn’t make me “happy” but I relished it. I’m not a baby or a coward. I’m not a “too-sooner.” Show me anything that smacks of honesty and hard truth or at least skillful manipulations of same, and I’m there for firsts, seconds and thirds.
Time‘s Richard Corliss called it “unbearable and unmissable.” Mainly the latter, I’d say. As long as it’s not a cheap-ass horror film, I eat “unbearable” for breakfast.
Not one frame of this film struck me as distasteful or exploitative. It shows what needs to be shown with as much restraint as could be managed without changing the known facts.
We were told at the screening that the print shown wasn’t quite finished. It looked pretty finished to me. No obviously raw effects, nothing that screamed out, “Oops …sorry!”
United 93 director Paul Greengrass during filming on set of Pinewood Studios.
What surprised me is that two-thirds of United 93 don’t have a whole lot to do with United #93. They’re about what happened as air traffic controllers, the FAA and the military tried to monitor what was happening with American Airlines #11, United #193 and American #77 (i.e., the flights that slammed into the North Tower, the South Tower and the Pentagon, respectively). It’s about how a lot of focused dec- ent professionals tried to keep up with the horror and couldn’t.
United 93 runs about an hour and 45 minutes. It’s about 30 minutes before Flight 93 takes off, but you’re not really paying that much attention, frankly, to those doomed souls on the plane…not at first. It’s the confused folks in the control rooms who pull you in. The second plane hits about 45 minutes in, give or take, and it’s another 15 minutes — a full hour — before the hijackers, who’ve waited and eyeball- ed each other from their first-class seats and stalled, it seems to me, like nervous nellies, before finally making their move.
For me, that opening hour is classic. Greengrass has never done anything quite as good. The tension and verisimilitude surpasses his work in Bloody Sunday, and that’s saying something. Each and every bit actor, every line…every last piece of it screws you to your seat.
Those guys playing air-traffic controllers are perfect. Remember the tension in that air-traffic controller scene in the opening moments of Close Encounters of the Third Kind? It’s that tripled or quadrupled. Ben Sliney, a gray-haired office mana- ger type who was having his first day on 9/11 as national operations manager for the FAA, plays himself. Nobody, really, seems to be “acting” in this. Every bit player rules in every control-room scene in this film.
Cast of United 93 on Pinewood sound stage.
What’s so affecting is that you know what’s coming, and Greengrass just lets it come…tick, tock, tick. There’s a spellbinding moment when it all starts…when a 40ish Boston air traffic controller first realizes that American #11 is off-course and not communicating. The moment isn’t especially heightened or emphasized. It’s just this guy going, “Okay…something’s off here”
Once the hijacking on United #93 begins and the killings and screamings and all the rest of that sad melodrama kicks in, then it’s a bit more familiar, especially if you’re up on what’s known to have happened and if you saw A&E’s Flight 93 movie last January. That was an okay film. I didn’t like the family members crying and saying “I love you” to their loved ones who were calling from the plane (which felt almost icky to me), but it was all right. And yet United 93, no offense, is about two and a half to three times better.
I saw it at the first non-Time magazine press screening on Tuesday night in Santa Monica, and a woman sitting two seats away got up twice, and it’s measure of how caught up I was that I was vaguely irritated when she left the second time. How many times does this woman need to take a leak? I wondered. Or is she leaving the room to give herself a break from the tension? Either way, I was vaguely irked. (Why should I care, right? It was her business. But I didn’t want any nearby move- ment.)
The remarkable accomplishent, for me, is that I felt no sense of time while watch- ing United 93. It lasts about 105 minutes, and it could have been 40 or 50 minutes. I didn’t care, didn’t think about it. The damn thing held me, vise-gripped me. Did I have a good time? Definitely, by my standards. I haven’t sat through a pulse-poun- der like this in months, and I can’t wait to see it again.
Ben Sliney, who was having his first day as national operations manager for the FAA on 9.11.01, plays himself.
Cheyenne Jackson, who plays Mark Bingham, the gay guy who died on United #93, was one of those at last night’s screening. I spoke to him briefly, told him it’s a hell of a film. He seemed kind of choked up and needed some alone time. Chris- tian Clemenson, who plays Thomas Burnett, was also there, but he was gone in a flash as soon as the credits started rolling.
One tiny beef: The last piece of copy on the black screen says that after 9/11, “America’s war on terror had begun.” The implied statement, of course, is, “And it continues today!” That it does, but if anyone thinks that what’s happening in Iraq right now (and what may even happen with Iran…who knows?) is a blow against terror they’re very much mistaken, and that final line struck me as a bit of a rah-rah statement. I think Greengrass should have just let what happened in the film (as he chose to dramatize it) stand on its own and leave well enough alone.
Puck Everlasting
The movies that seem to grab me the most are the ones that ask us to consider the mystical, the undefined, the intangibles…the ones that say “look up, look out, look beyond…there’s more to this world than what you can own, eat, taste or feel.”
The latest film to do this kind of thing well, and frankly one of the more interesting, amusing and affecting films I’ve seen over the last few weeks (if you don’t include An Inconvenient Truth, that is), is a new documentary about a bunch of guys who love to play air hockey.
It’s called Way of the Puck — and no one anywhere has seen it, except for a handful of film festival programmers. It’ll be having its world premiere at Houston’s Worldfest Film Festival in mid to late April.
Atypical action moment in Eric D. Anderson’s Way of the Puck, meaning that 98% of it was shot in regular color video.
I’m not saying it’s wet-your-pants fantastic, but if you can imagine something as arcane as a thinking man’s air-hockey film…one that doesn’t so much focus on a stupid plastic puck getting knocked back and forth by a couple of guys leaning over a gleaming blue plastic surface as much as…well, the zen approach to this simple-ass game, keeping a light touch, concentrating hard and yet not concen- trating as much as feeling the force…this is it.
The “maker” is Eric D. Anderson, a Los Angeles-based guy who works on music videos and commercials and has spent the last two-plus years putting this doc together, partly (as you might expect) because he’s a big air hockey nut himself, but also because he sees a Great Beyond inside it…a world within a world.
“On the surface air hockey seems like a story with very low stakes,” he writes on the film’s website. “Or no stakes at all. I get a lot of this. ‘Air hockey?’ people say, nodding slowly. ‘That game from the ’70s? Hunh.’
“Air hockey isn’t the unpopular kid who gets kicked around at recess. Air hockey is the kid no one notices, including the teacher. It’s a forgotten arcade game, a kid’s game, a relic, a jobby, a diversion, a trifle…and what could be less important than that?”
But in the making of this film, says Anderson, “I discovered a passionate and intelligent community of players. These are underdogs, participating in a fringe sport. They know they are dismissed and sometimes mocked and that air hockey will proably never be accepted by the mainstream. And yet they continue to travel thousands of miles to compete against the best players in the world.”
Way of the Puck is a guy film, mostly, obviously, but a smart one. Alert, spiritual, philosophically loaded. “Small” and a little familiar in certain ways, maybe a tiny bit repetitive (and maybe a little long…just a wee bit) but within its own territory it feels solid and connected and complete.
It’s a real middle-class film about a gaggle (somehow that word feels right rather than ‘group’) of five or six American middle class guys, most of them married and either pudgy or bearded or balding (or all three) who are serious air hockey freaks, and who all happen to be quite thoughtful and intelligent.
That’s the first big revelation — air hockey doesn’t seem to be played by meatball blue-collar types but by unusually bright and creative guys. Or so this film implies.
Eric D. Anderson
These aren’t exactly rugged individualists, but guys with a certain consistency and tenacity. Not the kind of men whom anyone would call intense or magnetic or start- ling, but men with an undeniable passion and dignity. And maybe a certain sadness or resignation thrown in, marital responsibilities and the day-to-day slog being what they are.
And yet they share an obvious, unshakable, undeniable belief in air hockey as some kind of transcendent pursuit…something that sustains their spirit, gets them through the rough patches, puts a special kind of English on their existence, makes life feel whole (or at least gives it a certain weight and dimension) and worth living.
More so from the audience perspective because air hockey isn’t that recognized or celebrated…far from it…but it’s their own thing, played as it is in those little rooms, and they’re happy with that. Or happy enough.
And there’s that cool robot. A one-armed guy resembling one of those Empire droids in Attack of the Clones playing a pretty good game of defensive air hockey with very some very fast reflexes. I’ve only seen human-sized robots with arms and legs do things like walk dogs and vacuum rugs. This guy’s different. Impressive.
Robot air hockey
The point of Way of the Puck is that an air-hockey player needs to be alive and alert and in touch with something inward and flowing to get anything out of the game. More than just a fast hand and a light touch, but man…that robot.
Anderson believes that air hockey is “the culmination of 2500 years of human thought — connected to astronomy and artificial intelligence, music and missiles, comics and country + western dancing, painting and punk rock.” I don’t know if I can go that far, but Way of the Puck convinced me that air hockey amounts to something, or at least the players do.
Memory Lane
April has barely begun and the media drumbeat over the year’s two big 9/11 films, both produced with the upcoming five-year anniversary in mind, is already pretty loud.
Press screenings for United 93 are beginning this week, stories attempting to gauge the public’s interest in seeing this and other 9/11 presentations are running (the Wall Street Journal and Newsweek ran theirs on 4.7 and 4.10, respectively), and we’ll be hearing more and more about Oliver Stone’s World Trade Center next month when a 20-minute reel from the 8.11 Paramount release is shown at the Cannes Film Festival.
Nicolas Cage as Sgt. John McLouglin in Oliver Stone’s World Trade Center (Paramount, 8.11)
The 9/11 anniversary isn’t for another five months, of course, but I’ve been thinking about another startling event that happened in Manhattan nearly five years ago — a panel discussion on Saturday, October 6, 2001, at Alice Tully Hall called “Making Movies That Matter: The Role of Film in the National Debate.”
I reported on this right after it happened and I’ve mentioned it since (most recently in a WIRED item around noon on Sunday, 4.9), so why dredge it up for the third or fourth time? Because what panelist Oliver Stone said that day is, to me, still bang -on-the-head thrilling, and I’ve been wondering what’s changed in the four and a half years since…if anything?
It’s Sunday, it’s sunny outside, birds are chirping and I’m just going to run this piece again. (Most of it.) It’s a portrait of what’s been happening in this town for a long time, but the precision and candor in Stone’s rant still resonates.
Stone tried to describe the mindset and inclinations of corporate-run Hollywood as he saw it back then. Has the situation abated, remained the same, gotten worse or what? Read this through and think about it. I’m asking.
I’m repeating what I said in the WIRED item, but this sure was a long time ago, especially considering the apparent repositioning that has happened inside Stone himself, who was obviously more than a bit of a firebrand on 10.6.01 and now look at him, the director of a 9/11 pic about a couple of Port Authority guys who got buried under the fallen towers…a film that’s starting to sound, frankly, like it may be a head-in-the-sand emotional comfort blanket disguised as a rescue thriller.
Before the ’01 debate: Lumumba director Raoul Peck, essayist Bell Hicks, director Oliver Stone, New Line Cinema honcho Robert Shaye, political writer Christopher Hitchens, former Universal Pictures chairman Tom Pollock, indie producer Christine Vachon (Boys Don’t Cry, Storytelling), former Universal Pictuers chairman Tom Pollock (almost completely hidden), and HBO executive Colin Callender.
I’m not saying World Trade Center won’t be a well-crafted or emotionally affecting drama. (Alexander aside, Stone is still a top-notch filmmaker). And who knows? Maybe it will contain echos and undercurrents that will add dimension to what screenwriter Andrea Berloff believes it is (“a boy-down-a-well saga’). But read the following and tell me Stone hasn’t trimmed his sails just a tad.
“Say what you will about Oliver Stone’s political views, but he’s a master at whipping up a crowd,” I began. “This was plainly evident during a panel discussion he participated in last Saturday at New York’s Alice Tully Hall called ‘Making Movies That Matter: The Role of Film in the National Debate.’
“The same brio that has enlivened many of Stone’s politically driven films, including JFK, Born on the Fourth of July, Platoon, and Nixon, was in full force during the sometimes brawl-like, HBO-sponsored discussion.
“Stone’s chief nemesis during the discussion — which also included some volleys from from political writer Christopher Hitchens, former Universal Pictures chairman Tom Pollock, indie producer Christine Vachon (Boys Don’t Cry, Storytelling), Lumumba director Raoul Peck, and political essayist Bell Hooks — was New Line Cinema chairman and CEO Robert Shaye.
“It fell to Shaye to articulate the status-quo views of corporate Hollywood, which elicited not only the wrath of Oliver but occasional groans from the audience. Much of what Shaye said was fair and sensible, but it was no match for the sweep of Stone’s oratory, which occasionally vaulted past the concerns of the entertainment industry to include speculation on the whys and wherefores of the 9/11 disaster.
“The central issue was whether Hollywood’s increasing reluctance to finance films with a strong political undercurrent (particularly in the wake of the World Trade Center attack) was being caused by a corporate-driven aversion to anything that isn’t essentially banal or superficial, as Stone asserted, or whether the main impediment to the funding of risky and/or controversial films is ‘the tyranny of talent,’ as Shaye put it, referring to astronomical fees demanded by actors and certain high-profile directors.
“Stone launched into one of his hardest-hitting points by recalling the relatively modest financing that gave birth to Born on the Fourth of July, his Oscar-winning 1989 drama about Vietnam veteran Ron Kovic that starred Tom Cruise.
“‘We struggled to make it,’ said Stone. ‘We had fights. The picture cost $16 million, and then it went to $17 or $18 million, and we fought for that extra two million like crazy.
“‘But this was 1989 — and there’s been no significant inflation in the United States since then,’ he continued. ‘Why, in 2001, does a picture that was done very tightly in 1989…[would] that picture today cost $60 to $80 million? With the marketing costs added in, which are inflated, putting it into the $90s…advertising and television…we’re talking a $100 to $135 million event.
“‘This would no longer be a movie, but an event. And someone like Tom Pollock would say…’Born on the Fourth of July? I’m not going to make that for $130 million!’ Because [this kind of film] can’t work any more in a system that has gone bananas .’
Lincoln Center’s Alice Tully Hall
“Stone was greeted by a passionate, sustained round of applause. Who doesn’t feel that films like Born on the Fourth of July, for which Stone won a Best Director Oscar and Cruise was nominated as Best Actor, are in woefully short supply these days?
“‘And this ties in to the Arab situation,’ Stone went on. ‘Why have we gone, in a non-inflationary era, to a [place] where our corporations have become huge over the last 10, 12 years? We’ve let them go. There’s been no trust-buster around. Teddy Roosevelt is long dead. And these media corporations have conglomerated themselves into six principal fiefdoms run by barons…they’re bigger than barons. They’re kings.’
“Stone was referring to Sumner Redstone who runs Viacom, which owns Paramount; Barry Meyer of Time-Warner, which owns Warner Bros. and New Line Cinema; Rupert Murdoch of Fox Newscorp., which runs 20th Century Fox; Mel Harris of Sony Pictures; Michael Eisner, the chairman/CEO of the Walt Disney Company; and Jean-Marie Messier of Vivendi, which owns Universal Pictures.”
[Note: Today’s media barons are Viacom’s Redstone, Newscorp’s Murdoch, Richard D. Parsons of Time-Warner, Sony Corp.’s chairman and CEO Howard Stringer, Disney CEO Bob Iger and Jeffrey R. Immelt, CEO of General Electric, which owns NBC Universal.]
“And these six companies decide,” said Stone. “Rupert Murdoch says ‘I would not make JFK,’ or Mike Eisner says ‘I would not do a film on Martin Luther King, Oliver, [because] there’s gonna be rioting at the gates of Disneyland’…you know, this is bullshit!”
“Gales of applause greeted this one, with some scattered yelps and cries of ‘right on!’
“‘These six people have control of the world and that’s what the new world order is,’ he explained. ‘Six men are deciding what you’re seeing in film, and they own all the small companies…it’s hard to find one that’s not owned by one of these huge companies buying new companies, so it’s a dilemma. There’s a control of culture, ideas, everything.
“Now, within reason, they let [filmmakers] do certain things, and that is far better obviously than, say, the Arabs where they don’t let you do anything, and I agree it’s relative. But we are in a dilemma. We have too much order.”
“‘And I think the revolt on September 11 was about order,’ Stone went on. “It was about fuck you, fuck your order…it was an eruption of rage about this. And is it time perhaps to reconsider the world order? Is it time to wonder why the banks have joined the movie companies and all the corporations, and where this is all going?”
“Hitchens, who writes for The Nation and Vanity Fair , bridled at the use of the term ‘revolt’ and said the September 11 massacre ‘was not a revolt. It was a state-supported mass murder using civilians as missiles. It was an attack on civil society and civilization.’ This drew vigorous applause, albeit slightly more subdued.
“Shaye said, ‘I disagree with Oliver about this. I think he’s talking about an era and the studio system of 30 years ago. I will tell you, and Tom Pollock will back me up on this, that this is a tyranny of talent right now, and I don’t know what Oliver gets for directing a film, but I know what a lot of other people get, and it’s way too much. I do know that the last guys to get paid, believe it or not, are the studios that put up the money, and…’
Robert Shaye (r.), co-chairman and co-CEO of New Line Cinema (pictured with Michael Lynne (l.)
“At this last remark, Stone shuddered and flopped back in his chair and looked up at the ceiling as if to say, ‘Did he just say that? I give up!’ Torrents of laughter. The hall was jumping.
“‘And if there’s a tyranny, it’s a tyranny of talent,’ Shaye concluded, drawing muted sneers and guffaws.
“Pollock, who was running Universal’s movie division when Born on the Fourth of July got made, said the go-ahead happened ‘because Oliver Stone was willing to make it for no money, and Tom Cruise was willing to make it for no money. The film was successful, they made a lot of money, and so did Universal, but it would not have been made had they not done that.
“‘Controversial films can still get made,’ said Pollock, ‘but films cost what they cost because most of the people who make them want to get paid as much as they can. They want control, but there is still that trade-off of money for control. We are in an oligarchy now where the large companies control what we see…yes, Rupert Murdoch has a political agenda, but by and large Rupert Murdoch is only interested in money.
“‘The problem with the six guys running the six companies is, they want to take no risks at all,’ he concluded. ‘They want movies that entertain only, if they can be marketed. There was little room before September 11 to make political movies inside the system. There’s less room now. It isn’t that it’s not going to happen. But it is going to be harder. And to that extent, Oliver is right.’
“Shaye said that New Line Cinema ‘started out in my apartment on 14th Street. We made our way in the world. We started out with Sympathy for the Devil. Talk about political…give me a break. And you know why it made money? Because the Rolling Stones were in it, not because Jean-Luc Godard had anything particularly profound to tell the world.’ Random hoots and snorts greeted this one.
“‘It’s a little disenchanting,’ Shaye continued. ‘The truth of the matter now is, right now, that with high-definition and video and stuff like that you can make a good movie for not very much money. The great thing about the entertainment business and the movie business is that when a movie’s good, you attract people. People talk about it, the whole word-of-mouth thing…the quality of a movie is a self-fulfilling mechanism.”
“Stone jumped back in. ‘Thirty years ago, Bob said before. That’s when he got started. It was all…it was another world. [But] nobody here has answered that question why, between ’89 and 2001, everything has become so uniform…what’s basically happened in the last 10 years is that the studios have bought television stations. And why?’
“Referring to the so-called ‘syn-fin’ legislation passed under the Clinton administration a couple of years ago that allowed studios to own more TV stations, Stone asked, ‘Why did that telecommunications bill get passed at midnight? It was basically a division of the world by a few media moguls and it was a giveaway and it was done at midnight and it’s a disgusting thing. To own TV stations is the basis upon which movie companies today have to exist. And that’s changed everything. There are only so many television stations. Each one has their big build-up and that’s their base of operation.
“‘And Bob [Shaye] knows it because he sold his little movie company to Warner Bros. for more money than I could ever dream of making,” Stone continued. He acknowledged that certain high-profile directors, such as himself, are well paid for helming big-studio films. But the majors these days “don’t need a top director, they feel. Just make the movie. Because for them it’s all about marketing and about subject. That’s what they think.
“‘So there’s no ‘left’ point of view. It’s not financially interesting for them to make a movie with a director who costs more money…they’d rather go with a marginal director. It’s all about product…movie product…and it’s all about this new world order.
“‘And the Arabs have a point. Whether it’s right or wrong, there’s an objection to the way the world is going. There’s a lot of hate and revolt in that state. It may continue and although the shoe may drop on the other foot the next time, the point is they’re objecting to something. And I say that we’re not dealing with that objection on this stage today. There was a breakdown in the ’90s, in the system, the world system, the world banking system…it’s the new world order, and it’s about order and control, but this control comes with a cost.
“‘One of the most banal ways for censorship to operate in America,’ Stone continued, ‘is to drive out thought by explosions of People magazines and celebrity culture and…our culture is focused on Sarah Jessica Parker and kind-of inane, superficial stuff…it just becomes the noise, the white noise of our society.”
“Turning to Pollock, Stone said, ‘I don’t want to pick on you, Tom, but you’re ignoring the banks, you’re ignoring television, you’re ignoring the size of this thing, and you’re saying this thing is okay because that’s the way of the world because capitalism will go that way.
“‘The so-called ways of capitalism are not inevitable,’ Stone exclaimed. ‘It’s changed historically. Teddy Roosevelt changed the direction of it. Franklin Roosevelt changed the direction of it. Everybody in Hollywood says, ‘Well, what can I do about it?” These six companies have taken over just like the oil companies, and it’s wrong, wrong, wrong because they’re subverting political will.'”
Ales & Stouts
Is Paul Greengrass‘s United 93 (Universal, 4.28) a knockout, a time-stopper, a mind-blower? It sure as hell is. You’re probably going to need to stand outside the theatre for a few minutes after it’s over and just chill…trust me. And then you’re going to want a drink, even if you don’t drink. And then talk it out with friends for an hour or so. See it with some. Don’t go alone.
Christian Clemenson (kneeling) as Thomas Burnett in the middle of passenger huddle during last act of United 93; Cheyenne Jackson, as Mark Bingham, is standing behind with the maroon shirt and hat.
Is feeling power-drilled all over again by one of the worst real-life nightmares of all time a good thing? To me, it is. It happened, it’s real, and this film knocks your socks off because it takes you right back to that surreal morning and that feeling, that almost-afraid-to-breathe feeling, and to me, that’s partly what good films do — they lift you out of your realm and make you forget about everything but what’s on-screen.
All I know is that I was watching and taking it all in, and that the old feelings started to build and churn around and then pour back in, like a damburst. The chills and forebodings of doom were back, and this time with a closer, more comprehensive perspective.
United 93 didn’t make me “happy” but I relished it. I’m not a baby or a coward. I’m not a “too-sooner.” Show me anything that smacks of honesty and hard truth or at least skillful manipulations of same, and I’m there for firsts, seconds and thirds.
Time‘s Richard Corliss called it “unbearable and unmissable.” Mainly the latter, I’d say. As long as it’s not a cheap-ass horror film, I eat “unbearable” for breakfast.
Not one frame of this film struck me as distasteful or exploitative. It shows what needs to be shown with as much restraint as could be managed without changing the known facts.
We were told at the screening that the print shown wasn’t quite finished. It looked pretty finished to me. No obviously raw effects, nothing that screamed out, “Oops …sorry!”
United 93 director Paul Greengrass during filming on set of Pinewood Studios.
What surprised me is that two-thirds of United 93 don’t have a whole lot to do with United flight #93. They’re about what happened as air traffic controllers, the FAA and the military tried to monitor what was happening with American Airlines #11, United #193 and American #77 (i.e., the flights that slammed into the North Tower, the South Tower and the Pentagon, respectively). It’s about how a lot of focused decent professionals tried to keep up with the horror and couldn’t.
United 93 runs about an hour and 45 minutes. It waits about 30 minutes before Flight 93 takes off, but you’re not really paying that much attention, frankly, to those doomed souls on the plane…not at first. It’s the confused folks in the control rooms who pull you in. The second plane hits about 45 minutes in, give or take, and it’s another 15 minutes — a full hour — before the hijackers, who’ve waited and eyeballed each other from their first-class seats and stalled, it seems to me, like nervous nellies, before finally making their move.
For me, that opening hour is classic. Greengrass has never done anything quite as good. The tension and verisimilitude surpasses his work in Bloody Sunday, and that’s saying something. Each and every bit actor, every line…every last piece of it screws you to your seat.
Those guys playing air-traffic controllers are perfect. Remember the tension in that air-traffic controller scene in the opening moments of Close Encounters of the Third Kind? It’s that tripled or quadrupled. Ben Sliney, a gray-haired office manager type who was having his first day on 9/11 as national operations manager for the FAA, plays himself. Nobody, really, seems to be “acting” in this. Every bit player rules in every control-room scene in this film.
Cast of United 93 on Pinewood sound stage.
What’s so affecting is that you know what’s coming, and Greengrass just lets it come…tick, tock, tick. There’s a spellbinding moment when it all starts…when a 40ish Boston air traffic controller first realizes that American #11 is off-course and not communicating. The moment isn’t especially heightened or emphasized. It’s just this guy going, “Okay…something’s off here”
Once the hijacking on United #93 begins and the killings and screamings and all the rest of that sad melodrama kick in, then it’s a bit more familiar, especially if you’re up on what’s known to have happened and if you saw A&E’s Flight 93 movie last January. That was an okay film. I didn’t like the family members crying and saying “I love you” to their loved ones who were calling from the plane (which felt almost icky to me), but it was all right. And yet United 93, no offense, is about two and a half to three times better.
I saw it at the first non-Time magazine press screening on Tuesday night in Santa Monica, and a woman sitting two seats away got up twice, and it’s measure of how caught up I was that I was vaguely irritated when she left the second time. How many times does this woman need to take a leak? Or is she leaving the room to give herself a break from the tension? Either way, I was vaguely irked. (Why should I care, right? It was her business. But I didn’t want any nearby movement.)
The remarkable accomplishent, for me, is that I felt no sense of time while watching United 93. It lasts about 105 minutes, and it could have been 40 or 50 minutes. I didn’t care, didn’t think about it. The damn thing held me, vise-gripped me. Did I have a good time? Definitely, by my standards. I haven’t sat through a pulse-pounder like this in months, and I can’t wait to see it again.
Ben Sliney, who was having his first day as national operations manager for the FAA on 9.11.01, plays himself.
Cheyenne Jackson, who plays Mark Bingham, the gay guy who died on United #93, was one of those at last night’s screening. I spoke to him briefly, told him it’s a hell of a film. He seemed kind of choked up and needed some alone time. Christian Clemenson, who plays Thomas Burnett, was also there, but he was gone in a flash as soon as the credits started rolling.
One tiny beef: The last piece of copy on the black screen says that after 9/11, “America’s war on terror had begun.” The implied statement, of course, is, “And it continues today!” That it does, but if anyone thinks that what’s happening in Iraq right now (and what may even happen with Iran…who knows?) is a blow against terror they’re very much mistaken, and that final line struck me as a bit of a rah-rah statement. I think Greengrass should have just let what happened in the film (as he chose to dramatize it) stand on its own and leave well enough alone.
Puck Everlasting
The movies that seem to grab me the most are the ones that ask us to consider the mystical, the undefined, the intangibles…the ones that say “look up, look out, look beyond…there’s more to this world than what you can own, eat, taste or feel.”
The latest film to do this kind of thing well, and frankly one of the more interesting, amusing and affecting films I’ve seen over the last few weeks (if you don’t include An Inconvenient Truth, that is), is a new documentary about a bunch of guys who love to play air hockey.
It’s called Way of the Puck — and no one anywhere has seen it, except for a handful of film festival programmers. It’ll be having its world premiere at Houston’s Worldfest Film Festival in mid to late April.
Atypical action moment in Eric D. Anderson’s Way of the Puck, meaning that 98% of it was shot in regular color video.
I’m not saying it’s wet-your-pants fantastic, but if you can imagine something as arcane as a thinking man’s air-hockey film…one that doesn’t so much focus on a stupid plastic puck getting knocked back and forth by a couple of guys leaning over a gleaming blue plastic surface as much as…well, the zen approach to this simple-ass game, keeping a light touch, concentrating hard and yet not concen- trating as much as feeling the force…this is it.
The “maker” is Eric D. Anderson, a Los Angeles-based guy who works on music videos and commercials and has spent the last two-plus years putting this doc together, partly (as you might expect) because he’s a big air hockey nut himself, but also because he sees a Great Beyond inside it…a world within a world.
“On the surface air hockey seems like a story with very low stakes,” he writes on the film’s website. “Or no stakes at all. I get a lot of this. ‘Air hockey?’ people say, nodding slowly. ‘That game from the ’70s? Hunh.’
“Air hockey isn’t the unpopular kid who gets kicked around at recess. Air hockey is the kid no one notices, including the teacher. It’s a forgotten arcade game, a kid’s game, a relic, a jobby, a diversion, a trifle…and what could be less important than that?”
But in the making of this film, says Anderson, “I discovered a passionate and intelligent community of players. These are underdogs, participating in a fringe sport. They know they are dismissed and sometimes mocked and that air hockey will proably never be accepted by the mainstream. And yet they continue to travel thousands of miles to compete against the best players in the world.”
Way of the Puck is a guy film, mostly, obviously, but a smart one. Alert, spiritual, philosophically loaded. “Small” and a little familiar in certain ways, maybe a tiny bit repetitive (and maybe a little long…just a wee bit) but within its own territory it feels solid and connected and complete.
It’s a real middle-class film about a gaggle (somehow that word feels right rather than ‘group’) of five or six American middle class guys, most of them married and either pudgy or bearded or balding (or all three) who are serious air hockey freaks, and who all happen to be quite thoughtful and intelligent.
That’s the first big revelation — air hockey doesn’t seem to be played by meatball blue-collar types but by unusually bright and creative guys. Or so this film implies.
Eric D. Anderson
These aren’t exactly rugged individualists, but guys with a certain consistency and tenacity. Not the kind of men whom anyone would call intense or magnetic or start- ling, but men with an undeniable passion and dignity. And maybe a certain sadness or resignation thrown in, marital responsibilities and the day-to-day slog being what they are.
And yet they share an obvious, unshakable, undeniable belief in air hockey as some kind of transcendent pursuit…something that sustains their spirit, gets them through the rough patches, puts a special kind of English on their existence, makes life feel whole (or at least gives it a certain weight and dimension) and worth living.
More so from the audience perspective because air hockey isn’t that recognized or celebrated…far from it…but it’s their own thing, played as it is in those little rooms, and they’re happy with that. Or happy enough.
And there’s that cool robot. A one-armed guy resembling one of those Empire droids in Attack of the Clones playing a pretty good game of defensive air hockey with very some very fast reflexes. I’ve only seen human-sized robots with arms and legs do things like walk dogs and vacuum rugs. This guy’s different. Impressive.
Robot air hockey
The point of Way of the Puck is that an air-hockey player needs to be alive and alert and in touch with something inward and flowing to get anything out of the game. More than just a fast hand and a light touch, but man…that robot.
Anderson believes that air hockey is “the culmination of 2500 years of human thought — connected to astronomy and artificial intelligence, music and missiles, comics and country + western dancing, painting and punk rock.” I don’t know if I can go that far, but Way of the Puck convinced me that air hockey amounts to something, or at least the players do.
Memory Lane
April has barely begun and the media drumbeat over the year’s two big 9/11 films, both produced with the upcoming five-year anniversary in mind, is already pretty loud.
Press screenings for United 93 are beginning this week, stories attempting to gauge the public’s interest in seeing this and other 9/11 presentations are running (the Wall Street Journal and Newsweek ran theirs on 4.7 and 4.10, respectively), and we’ll be hearing more and more about Oliver Stone’s World Trade Center next month when a 20-minute reel from the 8.11 Paramount release is shown at the Cannes Film Festival.
Nicolas Cage as Sgt. John McLouglin in Oliver Stone’s World Trade Center (Paramount, 8.11)
The 9/11 anniversary isn’t for another five months, of course, but I’ve been thinking about another startling event that happened in Manhattan nearly five years ago — a panel discussion on Saturday, October 6, 2001, at Alice Tully Hall called “Making Movies That Matter: The Role of Film in the National Debate.”
I reported on this right after it happened and I’ve mentioned it since (most recently in a WIRED item around noon on Sunday, 4.9), so why dredge it up for the third or fourth time? Because what panelist Oliver Stone said that day is, to me, still bang -on-the-head thrilling, and I’ve been wondering what’s changed in the four and a half years since…if anything?
It’s Sunday, it’s sunny outside, birds are chirping and I’m just going to run this piece again. (Most of it.) It’s a portrait of what’s been happening in this town for a long time, but the precision and candor in Stone’s rant still resonates.
Stone tried to describe the mindset and inclinations of corporate-run Hollywood as he saw it back then. Has the situation abated, remained the same, gotten worse or what? Read this through and think about it. I’m asking.
I’m repeating what I said in the WIRED item, but this sure was a long time ago, especially considering the apparent repositioning that has happened inside Stone himself, who was obviously more than a bit of a firebrand on 10.6.01 and now look at him, the director of a 9/11 pic about a couple of Port Authority guys who got buried under the fallen towers…a film that’s starting to sound, frankly, like it may be a head-in-the-sand emotional comfort blanket disguised as a rescue thriller.
Before the ’01 debate: Lumumba director Raoul Peck, essayist Bell Hicks, director Oliver Stone, New Line Cinema honcho Robert Shaye, political writer Christopher Hitchens, former Universal Pictures chairman Tom Pollock, indie producer Christine Vachon (Boys Don’t Cry, Storytelling), former Universal Pictuers chairman Tom Pollock (almost completely hidden), and HBO executive Colin Callender.
I’m not saying World Trade Center won’t be a well-crafted or emotionally affecting drama. (Alexander aside, Stone is still a top-notch filmmaker). And who knows? Maybe it will contain echos and undercurrents that will add dimension to what screenwriter Andrea Berloff believes it is (“a boy-down-a-well saga’). But read the following and tell me Stone hasn’t trimmed his sails just a tad.
“Say what you will about Oliver Stone’s political views, but he’s a master at whipping up a crowd,” I began. “This was plainly evident during a panel discussion he participated in last Saturday at New York’s Alice Tully Hall called ‘Making Movies That Matter: The Role of Film in the National Debate.’
“The same brio that has enlivened many of Stone’s politically driven films, including JFK, Born on the Fourth of July, Platoon, and Nixon, was in full force during the sometimes brawl-like, HBO-sponsored discussion.
“Stone’s chief nemesis during the discussion — which also included some volleys from from political writer Christopher Hitchens, former Universal Pictures chairman Tom Pollock, indie producer Christine Vachon (Boys Don’t Cry, Storytelling), Lumumba director Raoul Peck, and political essayist Bell Hooks — was New Line Cinema chairman and CEO Robert Shaye.
“It fell to Shaye to articulate the status-quo views of corporate Hollywood, which elicited not only the wrath of Oliver but occasional groans from the audience. Much of what Shaye said was fair and sensible, but it was no match for the sweep of Stone’s oratory, which occasionally vaulted past the concerns of the entertainment industry to include speculation on the whys and wherefores of the 9/11 disaster.
“The central issue was whether Hollywood’s increasing reluctance to finance films with a strong political undercurrent (particularly in the wake of the World Trade Center attack) was being caused by a corporate-driven aversion to anything that isn’t essentially banal or superficial, as Stone asserted, or whether the main impediment to the funding of risky and/or controversial films is ‘the tyranny of talent,’ as Shaye put it, referring to astronomical fees demanded by actors and certain high-profile directors.
“Stone launched into one of his hardest-hitting points by recalling the relatively modest financing that gave birth to Born on the Fourth of July, his Oscar-winning 1989 drama about Vietnam veteran Ron Kovic that starred Tom Cruise.
“‘We struggled to make it,’ said Stone. ‘We had fights. The picture cost $16 million, and then it went to $17 or $18 million, and we fought for that extra two million like crazy.
“‘But this was 1989 — and there’s been no significant inflation in the United States since then,’ he continued. ‘Why, in 2001, does a picture that was done very tightly in 1989…[would] that picture today cost $60 to $80 million? With the marketing costs added in, which are inflated, putting it into the $90s…advertising and television…we’re talking a $100 to $135 million event.
“‘This would no longer be a movie, but an event. And someone like Tom Pollock would say…’Born on the Fourth of July? I’m not going to make that for $130 million!’ Because [this kind of film] can’t work any more in a system that has gone bananas .’
Lincoln Center’s Alice Tully Hall
“Stone was greeted by a passionate, sustained round of applause. Who doesn’t feel that films like Born on the Fourth of July, for which Stone won a Best Director Oscar and Cruise was nominated as Best Actor, are in woefully short supply these days?
“‘And this ties in to the Arab situation,’ Stone went on. ‘Why have we gone, in a non-inflationary era, to a [place] where our corporations have become huge over the last 10, 12 years? We’ve let them go. There’s been no trust-buster around. Teddy Roosevelt is long dead. And these media corporations have conglomerated themselves into six principal fiefdoms run by barons…they’re bigger than barons. They’re kings.’
“Stone was referring to Sumner Redstone who runs Viacom, which owns Paramount; Barry Meyer of Time-Warner, which owns Warner Bros. and New Line Cinema; Rupert Murdoch of Fox Newscorp., which runs 20th Century Fox; Mel Harris of Sony Pictures; Michael Eisner, the chairman/CEO of the Walt Disney Company; and Jean-Marie Messier of Vivendi, which owns Universal Pictures.”
[Note: Today’s media barons are Viacom’s Redstone, Newscorp’s Murdoch, Richard D. Parsons of Time-Warner, Sony Corp.’s chairman and CEO Howard Stringer, Disney CEO Bob Iger and Jeffrey R. Immelt, CEO of General Electric, which owns NBC Universal.]
“And these six companies decide,” said Stone. “Rupert Murdoch says ‘I would not make JFK,’ or Mike Eisner says ‘I would not do a film on Martin Luther King, Oliver, [because] there’s gonna be rioting at the gates of Disneyland’…you know, this is bullshit!”
“Gales of applause greeted this one, with some scattered yelps and cries of ‘right on!’
“‘These six people have control of the world and that’s what the new world order is,’ he explained. ‘Six men are deciding what you’re seeing in film, and they own all the small companies…it’s hard to find one that’s not owned by one of these huge companies buying new companies, so it’s a dilemma. There’s a control of culture, ideas, everything.
“Now, within reason, they let [filmmakers] do certain things, and that is far better obviously than, say, the Arabs where they don’t let you do anything, and I agree it’s relative. But we are in a dilemma. We have too much order.”
“‘And I think the revolt on September 11 was about order,’ Stone went on. “It was about fuck you, fuck your order…it was an eruption of rage about this. And is it time perhaps to reconsider the world order? Is it time to wonder why the banks have joined the movie companies and all the corporations, and where this is all going?”
“Hitchens, who writes for The Nation and Vanity Fair , bridled at the use of the term ‘revolt’ and said the September 11 massacre ‘was not a revolt. It was a state-supported mass murder using civilians as missiles. It was an attack on civil society and civilization.’ This drew vigorous applause, albeit slightly more subdued.
“Shaye said, ‘I disagree with Oliver about this. I think he’s talking about an era and the studio system of 30 years ago. I will tell you, and Tom Pollock will back me up on this, that this is a tyranny of talent right now, and I don’t know what Oliver gets for directing a film, but I know what a lot of other people get, and it’s way too much. I do know that the last guys to get paid, believe it or not, are the studios that put up the money, and…’
Robert Shaye (r.), co-chairman and co-CEO of New Line Cinema (pictured with Michael Lynne (l.)
“At this last remark, Stone shuddered and flopped back in his chair and looked up at the ceiling as if to say, ‘Did he just say that? I give up!’ Torrents of laughter. The hall was jumping.
“‘And if there’s a tyranny, it’s a tyranny of talent,’ Shaye concluded, drawing muted sneers and guffaws.
“Pollock, who was running Universal’s movie division when Born on the Fourth of July got made, said the go-ahead happened ‘because Oliver Stone was willing to make it for no money, and Tom Cruise was willing to make it for no money. The film was successful, they made a lot of money, and so did Universal, but it would not have been made had they not done that.
“‘Controversial films can still get made,’ said Pollock, ‘but films cost what they cost because most of the people who make them want to get paid as much as they can. They want control, but there is still that trade-off of money for control. We are in an oligarchy now where the large companies control what we see…yes, Rupert Murdoch has a political agenda, but by and large Rupert Murdoch is only interested in money.
“‘The problem with the six guys running the six companies is, they want to take no risks at all,’ he concluded. ‘They want movies that entertain only, if they can be marketed. There was little room before September 11 to make political movies inside the system. There’s less room now. It isn’t that it’s not going to happen. But it is going to be harder. And to that extent, Oliver is right.’
“Shaye said that New Line Cinema ‘started out in my apartment on 14th Street. We made our way in the world. We started out with Sympathy for the Devil. Talk about political…give me a break. And you know why it made money? Because the Rolling Stones were in it, not because Jean-Luc Godard had anything particularly profound to tell the world.’ Random hoots and snorts greeted this one.
“‘It’s a little disenchanting,’ Shaye continued. ‘The truth of the matter now is, right now, that with high-definition and video and stuff like that you can make a good movie for not very much money. The great thing about the entertainment business and the movie business is that when a movie’s good, you attract people. People talk about it, the whole word-of-mouth thing…the quality of a movie is a self-fulfilling mechanism.”
“Stone jumped back in. ‘Thirty years ago, Bob said before. That’s when he got started. It was all…it was another world. [But] nobody here has answered that question why, between ’89 and 2001, everything has become so uniform…what’s basically happened in the last 10 years is that the studios have bought television stations. And why?’
“Referring to the so-called ‘syn-fin’ legislation passed under the Clinton administration a couple of years ago that allowed studios to own more TV stations, Stone asked, ‘Why did that telecommunications bill get passed at midnight? It was basically a division of the world by a few media moguls and it was a giveaway and it was done at midnight and it’s a disgusting thing. To own TV stations is the basis upon which movie companies today have to exist. And that’s changed everything. There are only so many television stations. Each one has their big build-up and that’s their base of operation.
“‘And Bob [Shaye] knows it because he sold his little movie company to Warner Bros. for more money than I could ever dream of making,” Stone continued. He acknowledged that certain high-profile directors, such as himself, are well paid for helming big-studio films. But the majors these days “don’t need a top director, they feel. Just make the movie. Because for them it’s all about marketing and about subject. That’s what they think.
“‘So there’s no ‘left’ point of view. It’s not financially interesting for them to make a movie with a director who costs more money…they’d rather go with a marginal director. It’s all about product…movie product…and it’s all about this new world order.
“‘And the Arabs have a point. Whether it’s right or wrong, there’s an objection to the way the world is going. There’s a lot of hate and revolt in that state. It may continue and although the shoe may drop on the other foot the next time, the point is they’re objecting to something. And I say that we’re not dealing with that objection on this stage today. There was a breakdown in the ’90s, in the system, the world system, the world banking system…it’s the new world order, and it’s about order and control, but this control comes with a cost.
“‘One of the most banal ways for censorship to operate in America,’ Stone continued, ‘is to drive out thought by explosions of People magazines and celebrity culture and…our culture is focused on Sarah Jessica Parker and kind-of inane, superficial stuff…it just becomes the noise, the white noise of our society.”
“Turning to Pollock, Stone said, ‘I don’t want to pick on you, Tom, but you’re ignoring the banks, you’re ignoring television, you’re ignoring the size of this thing, and you’re saying this thing is okay because that’s the way of the world because capitalism will go that way.
“‘The so-called ways of capitalism are not inevitable,’ Stone exclaimed. ‘It’s changed historically. Teddy Roosevelt changed the direction of it. Franklin Roosevelt changed the direction of it. Everybody in Hollywood says, ‘Well, what can I do about it?” These six companies have taken over just like the oil companies, and it’s wrong, wrong, wrong because they’re subverting political will.'”
Ales & Stouts
There’s a 4.9 Time story, written by Richard Corliss and reported by Clayton Neuman and Rebecca Winters, about the various 9/11 films, and it includes these comments from Andrea Berloff about World Trade Center (Paramount, 8.11), which she wrote the screenplay for: “It’s a boy-down-a-well saga with no politics. This is a small story. We’re in the hole with these two guys for practically the whole movie. You don’t want people leaving theaters slitting their wrists. I don’t think the world is ready for the Towering Inferno version of 9/11. I don’t know how you would make that movie.” I don’t want to see an Irwin Allen 9/11 movie either, but Berloff’s description of World Trade Center doesn’t sound much like a film directed by Oliver Stone, does it? “In the hole,” indeed.
Depth of Feeling
In real life Roberta Maxwell, the gifted New York actress who’s quietly riveting as Jake Gyllenhaal’s bereaved mom during a four- or five-minute scene near the finale of Brokeback Mountain, barely resembles her emotionally bruised, hardscrabble character.
Her face is pale and plain and vaguely trembling in Ang Lee’s film, and with short, sort-of-mousey red hair. Very much a cowering but compassionate farmer’s wife from Wyoming. But the woman who opened her apartment door at 6 pm on New Year’s Eve was a pert and sophisticated New Yorker in glasses, her blondish-gray hair cut even shorter and her eyes the opposite of morose.
Roberta Maxwell during the second-to-last scene in Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain
Imagine that! An actress who can not only manipulate her appearance but do a little internal tossing of the emotional salad.
Maxwell isn’t the only Brokeback Mountain actress who supplies a strong dose of hurt — there’s also the excellent Kate Mara and Linda Cardellini as Heath Ledger’s daughter and jilted girlfriend, respectively, on top of Michelle Williams and Anne Hathaway’s lead performances as unhappy wives — but Maxwell makes her mark in what is arguably the film’s penultimate scene.
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It’s obvious that Maxwell’s mom and her scowling homophobic husband (played by the great Peter McRobbie) know what kind of relationship Ledger’s Ennis del Mar had with their son Jack, but her grief-ridden face is full of acceptance and compas- sion when del Mar pays a visit. And all of this hemmed in by fear of her husband’s rattlesnake temperament.
It’s the quiet but devastating interplay between Maxwell, McRobbie and Ledger that increases the film’s sadness to peak strength and sets up the film’s final hit, which comes when Mara tells Ledger she’s getting married to an oil-field worker named Kurt, and then leaves him alone in his trailer with Jack’s shirt hanging in the closet.
In fact, the more you watch Maxwell’s scene (I have a DVD screener of the film), the more clear it becomes that her underperforming of this exquisitely shot den- ouement is the emotional springboard of that last ten- or twelve-minute section. She’s got the whole film in her eyes.
Snapped about six hours before midnight in Maxwell’s Manhattan apartment — 12.31.05, 6:15 pm
And she had only a few hours to make it work.
Maxwell shot her footage in July 2004, not on a set but inside the rundown farm- house seen in the film, which is located about an hour outside Calgary, Alberta, which was a cheaper place to shoot than Wyoming, where most of the film’s story unfolds.
“When I arrived at the set, people were getting ready to leave,” she recalls. “It was the very end of the shoot.”
Jack’s mom is “a lifelong Pentecostal Christian,” says Maxwell. “And in this last scene we see this tension and fear about what she knows her husband feels about this relationship, and about great cruelty and suffering she has endured herself, but she shows compassion to Ennis because she can see Jack was obviously very much loved.”
Maxwell suspects that Brokeback Mountain‘s casting director Avy Kaufman arranged a meeting with director Ang Lee a few months earlier because she had played the mother of Sean Penn’s condemned prisoner in Dead Man Walking (’95) and “so I have a history of sad mothers.”
She sensed during her sit-down with Lee that “we had connected on a level that would make me a very strong competitor [for the part].”
Maxwell, Len Cariou and director Ethan McSweeny during a promotional stint on behalf of a relatively recent Pace University production of “The Persians.”
Brokeback Mountain had been showing to industry and festival audiences since early September, but Maxwell didn’t see it until it opened commercially on December 9th.
“I was really shocked by the scene, by our scene,” she recalls. “The starkness of it…the simplicity. And how [Lee] shot it, like when I put my hand on Heath’s shoul- der. I grabbed my friend sitting next to me. It was so strange, this old hand…I said to myself, is that mine?”
Maxwell began as a child actor in the ’50s, and has done lots of New York theatre, television, TV movies and features.
Her Dead Man Walking performance was, if you ask me, the big standout before Brokeback Mountain. She played the judge in Jonathan Demme’s Philadelphia (i.e., the one administering when Tom Hanks collapsed in court). And she had the lead female role in the 1975 debut stage production of Peter Shaffer’s Equus with costars Anthony Hopkins and Peter Firth. (That’s right…the naked-in-the-stables role.)
Maxwell was told in early October that her performance was special by none other than Annie Proulx, the author of the “Brokeback Mountain” short story that Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana’s screenplay is so closely based upon. The advance review came in the form of a letter, and it brought Maxwell to tears.
Sometime around ’76 or ’77
It reads: “Dear Roberta Maxwell — Just the right touch…the almost-crushed wife of a martinette who under his very nose and in only a few lines about cake and coffee, gets across the message that she knew and understood what Jack meant to Ennis. I don’t know how you did it in so small a compass. With much apprecia- tion, Annie Proulx.”
Maxwell read this to me aloud near the end of our talk. Here’s a recording of about half of it.
She asked last night how I think Brokeback Mountain will do at the Oscars, and when I repeated the conventional wisdom that it’s the Best Picture front-runner, she feigned surprise. I would play it that way if I were her.
Maxwell told the Toronto Star‘s Martin Knelman that she’ll be visiting Los Angeles soon “so I can enjoy the fun of Brokeback being touted for the Oscars. It’s such a special time and such a special film. Why not enjoy it while it lasts?”
If it were my call (and I can’t imagine Focus Features not feeling the same way), Maxwell will wind up sitting next to her costars and Lee and the film’s producer James Schamus and all the others at the Oscar Awards. If there’s anyone apart from the core players who deserves such an honor, it’s Maxwell.
I mean, c’mon, she’s the ninth-inning pinch hitter…the windup, the pitch…thwack!
Snowstorm Grabs
(l. to r.) Subway tracks leading from Marcy Street into Manhattan during height of yesterday afternoon’s very slushy snow storm — 12.31.05, 3:05 pm
Budget-level Chinese restaurant in Chinatown, near corner of Mott and Bayard.
There’s a character in Woody Allen’s What’s Up, Tiger Lily called Wing Fat, played by Susumu Kurobe…and the name was meant as an ethnic goof
Oh-Six Starters
There are four January releases that definitely cut the mustard in my pantry, and two or three with one or two problems but are recommended regardless. So things are starting off reasonably well. For a month known for so-so product, I mean.
The absolute must-see’s are Lajos Koltai’s Fateless (Thinkfilm, 1.6), Eugene Jarecki’s Why We Fight (Sony Pictures Classics, 1.20), Steven Soderbergh’s Bubble (Magnolia, 1.27) and Michael Winterbottom’s Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story (Picturehouse, 1.27).
From Lajos Koltai’s Fateless (and not what it seems to be)
The not-bad-with-reservations in order of preference are Ol Parker’s Imagine Me and You (Fox Searchlight, 1.27), Albert Brooks’ Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World (Warner Bros., 1.20) and Lars von Trier’s Manderlay (IFC Films, 1.27).
I’ve seen some others and can riff a bit about them, but aside from these six or seven we all know what January is about. That is, if you aren’t priveleged or con- nected enough to go to Sundance and you pay to see new movies in your local plex. It’s about feeling vaguely burned.
Or it’s about catching up with Xmas films and watching more DVDs than usual or maybe picking up a book…but the mood that settles over a multiplex in January is rarely expectant, much less electric.
Here’s what I know, have heard or am deducing thus far…
January 6: Fateless is the first near-great film of 2006. The exquisite widescreen framing, desaturated color and exquisite editing make it, to my eyes, the most visually immaculate Holocaust death-camp drama ever made (does that sound right?) as well as one of the most realistic seeming and subtly-rendered in terms of story.
Based on Imre Kertesz’s mostly true-life account, it’s about a young Jewish boy from Budapest who ends up in a concentration camp during World War II and just barely survives. It lacks the story tension and rooting factor of Polanski’s The Pianist, but situations of hunger, despair and the ashy aura of near-death have never been rendered with such remarkable pictorial finesse.
Otherwise, I’ve been told by a young guy I completely trust that Grandma’s Boy is absolutely atrocious. I don’t know about BloodRayne except for the hot babe in the poster. I’ve seen the Hostel trailer and that’s as far as I go. Not a very brave or engaging attitude, I’ll admit. (I generally loathe horror films even though I rather liked Wolf Creek, which so many other critics were deeply offended by.)
January 13: The only one I’ve seen is Laurence Dunmore’s The Libertine (Weinstein Co.) and the less said about it, the better. Johnny Depp is utterly dislikable as a smart but self-destructive Old World asshole named John Wilmot, the second Earl of Rochester. Muddy, desaturated color…gobs of period detail without no discernible spark of life…an almost completely detestable film.
The trailer for Kevin Reynolds’ Tristan & Isolde (20th Century Fox)…oh, no….oh, no….Rufus Sewell is in it. I’m sorry but that tears it. And please…not another swords-and-horses romantic triangle King Arthur– slash-First Knight-type thing. How can studio executives greenlight this stuff and still look at themselves in the mirror?
James Franco (Tristan) is a very fine and charismatic actor who can’t seem to catch a wave, much less a break. (He’s also in Justin Lin’s Annapolis, opening on 1.27.) Sophia Myles, whom I liked in Art School Confidential, is a very intelligent, seemingly passionate actress with a very chubby moon face. Curvy, not-slim actresses are becoming more and more common these days, but there haven’t been any high-wattage moon-faced actresses since the days of Theda Bara.
Misty Wilkins, hot-stuff star of Steven Soderbergh’s Bubble
And zipposky on April’s Shower, Glory Road, Hoodwinked, Last Holiday, On The Outs.
January 20: Eugene Jarecki’s Why We Fight is not just the best film being released on this date but sure to be listed among the year’s (and probably the decade’s) finest also. A brilliantly told history of America’s military industrial complex and war machine. And very well made…well paced…totally blue-chip all the way. John McCain, Gore Vidal, William Kristol, Chalmers Johnson and Richard Perle are among the talking heads.
There are good things — more than a few good things — in Albert Brooks’ Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World (Warner Bros.). It’s dry and disciplined and somewhat amusing here and there, but it has an older guy’s energy levels and — frankly? — not that great a story.
You’d think a movie about what makes Muslims laugh would at least take a stab at answering this question. And it would have worked better if Brooks (playing himself) had somehow managed to visit the real Muslim world (Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, et. al.) instead of India, where most of this film takes place.
India is not where the terrorists are. Call for tech support and a very polite idiot who knows absolutely nothing about how to help you with your problem…that‘s India.
Albert Brooks (l.) in Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World
You know that Underworld: Evolution (Screen Gems), the Underword sequel, is solely about trying to grab a portion of the $100 million earned by the original. With Kate Beckinsdale and Scott Speedman reprising their roles, what are the odds of this being any more that the usual breathy-moldy-sexy CGI vampire-werewolf crap?
The trailer certainly gives every indication it’s a straight programmer and strictly a paycheck movie for the talent. If it rises even a tiny bit above the level of pure bilge I will buy a red rubber enema bag and do the appropriate thing.
Nothing about End of the Spear, Pizza, The Real Dirt on Farmer John.
January 27: Bubble is a minimalist murder tale from Steven Soderbergh, shot on video with non-pro actors. It’s a very clean, creepy and absorbing piece. It’s modest but damn fine within its perimeter. I consider Bubble Soderbergh’s return to form — the first high-grade wow thing he’s done since Traffic.
I wrote during the Toronto Film Festival that “as far as I’m concerned Bubble, a heart-of-proletariat-darkness drama, is reason to pop open the champagne and breathe easy. Soderbergh was falling off the horse repeatedly with Full Frontal, Solaris and the two Ocean‘s movies…but he hunkered down and stayed with the process and that constant-state-of-becoming trip that all artists need to be into, and now he’s back.”
Oh Parker’s Imagine Me and You, which I saw at Toronto, is one of those rotely British romantic confections, although nowhere near as sickening as Love Actually and for the most part a reasonably decent and even (at times) touching thing.
It’s about a woman (Piper Parabo) who falls in love with another woman (Lena Headley) on her wedding day…which leaves her husband Heck (Matthew Goode) confused and out in the cold. It’s formulaic and tidy, although at times I could feel the capability on Parker’s part (if not the willingness) to make a complex adult relationship drama along the lines of John Schlesinger’s Sunday Bloody Sunday.
I didn’t hear a single unkind word about Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story during the Toronto Film Festival, so even though I didn’t see it myself it seems like a reasonably safe call to put it on the recommend list.
It’s basically the bone-dry British funnyman Steve Coogan starring in some kind of smart-ass variation of Karel Reisz’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1982). It’s a film about the making of an historical film — an adaptation of Laurence Stern’s “The Life and Opinions of Tristram Sahndy, Gentlemen” — while at the same time a look at the historical characters as well as the actors portraying them.
Willem Dafoe, Bryce Dallas Howard in Lars von Trier’s Manderlay
After seeing Lars von Trier’s Manderlay in Cannes last May I wrote that “it didn’t do it for me, and I’m speaking as a totally ardent fan of von Trier’s Dogville, Dancer in the Dark and Breaking the Waves, as well as being a general fool for his bad-boy provocations.
“It’s a relentlessly talky, intelligent and provocative film that addresses…well, American racism, certainly, but more generally a do-gooder tendency by American governments to try and shape other societies so they more resemble our own (Iraq, Vietnam, etc.). And it indulges in the usual proddings and agitations that are par for this Danish filmmaker.
“The second installment in von Trier’s America trilogy, Manderlay is a continuation of the adventures of Grace, the gangster’s daughter played by Nicole Kidman in Dogville, the trilogy’s 2003 kickoff, and by Bryce Dallas Howard in the new film.
Sophia Miles, James Franco in Kevin Reynolds’ Tristan and Isolde
“Both films are stagey and pedantically inclined, and shot on what is probably the same massive sound stage with imaginary props and sets. (The third installment will presumably follow suit.)
“Manderlay is too similar to Dogville and not similar enough. Despite its slow pace and too-gradual plot development, Dogville had a surprise revelation (Kidman is the daughter of gangster James Caan, and not his girlfriend, as the film allows us to assume at first) and a shockingly violent finale that expressed von Trier’s negative feelings about what he sees as American tendencies to exploit the less fortunate.
“Like Dogville it’s broken up by titled chapters, John Hurt again provides the dry and pungent narration, and the closing credit sequence is nearly identical with the same David Bowie song (‘Young Americans’) played over a series of stills that illuminate the uglier aspects of America’s history — in this instance the treatment of African-Americans over the last century or so.
“But there’s no big jolt or surprise at the finale — you can pretty much tell what’s coming from the get-go — and it so closely recalls Dogville‘s aching-butt aspects that watching it feels like a chore.
Eugene Jarecki discussing Why We Fight at the 2005 Sundance Film Festival
Otherwise…
Annapolis isn’t a precise revisiting of An Officer and a Gentleman but it’s obviously on similar turf with the element of boxing thrown in. Annapolis, boxing…Annapolis, boxing. Better Luck Tomorrow helmer Justin Lin is the director, and I should just keep my mouth shut until I see it.
Big Momma’s House 2 can have coitus with itself. Breaking News looks to me like a standard-issue Hong Kong cop thriller, and I’m not vigorous enough to try and figure the real truth of it. Mirage, Nanny McPhee and the IMAX film Roving Mars haven’t yet come into focus.
You don’t have confuse Tristram Shandy with Tristan and Isolde — “Tristram” has two r’s and the movie is fairly jaunty and flip, and the other one is bold-faced sincere.
Grabs
(l. to r.) Occasional Hollywood Elsewhere columnist Dylan Wells, Becca Payne and producer-screenwriter L.M. Kit Carson at Columbia student bar at Broadway and 113th Street — Tuesday, 12.27, 10:15 pm
On IRT Lexington uptown — Saturday, 12.24, 3:10 pm.
Troubador in waiting area for Union Square L line to Brooklyn — Monday, 12.26, 11:25 pm.
$30 jar of ginger orange foam scrub, purchased at Sabon on Spring Street on Sunday, 12.25, 8:40 pm.
Mott Street in Little Italy — Thursday, 12.29, 8:20 pm.
Canal Street near Manhattan Bridge — Thursday, 12.29, 7:15 pm.
Grand Central Station — Tuesday, 12.27, 4:25 pm.
On L train heading to Brooklyn — Tuesday, 1.27, 11:45 pm
What would Nic Cage (or a character played by him), Joan of Arc and Oliver Reed’s “Father Grandier” character in The Devils have in common? Something, I think…unless Neil Labute has decided to re-shuffle the story of The Wicker Man.
Thurday, 12.29, 8:15 pm.
Herzog vs. Huffman
“Thanks for celebrating Werner Herzog, the most amazing director working today. However…
“While I don’t disagree with you and Time‘s Richard Corliss for celebrating his little seen recent, wonderful documentary The White Diamond, I wonder if you were aware just how contrived the film is.
“Recently Herzog was in Seattle for a short festival of some of his recent films and in the q & a session afterwards he explained that pretty much everything said in the interview sessions in the film (particularly from the talkative local man who owned the rooster) was completely scripted.
“Herzog said it in way that made it seem like he would be stunned if anyone could possibly think it was done any other way. He described in detail how he wrote complete speeches for the folks and how they would struggle to deliver them (the speeches are basically based on his conversations with the interviewees and Herzog’s own thoughts).
“If anything, knowing that this is how Herzog constructs his documentaries makes me like them even more. All documentaries are a succession of lies that form a particular person’s greater truth. I am just surprised that Herzog seemed to assume that everyone else was in on the secret.” — Richard Huffman, Seattle, WA.
Werner Herzog replies: “Jeffrey — [Huffman’s] questions about The White Diamond are too simplified. Why would I who postulates a cinema where you can trust your eyes again (Fitzcarraldo) ‘concoct’ elements of his ‘documentaries’?
“My inventions and stylizations aim to penetrate into a deeper truth, whereas Reality TV only pretends to depict the ‘real’ but captures just facts, and not truth.
“I have to be more precise to distinguish between two major issues:
“1. Whenever it comes to visual material, I want audiences to trust their eyes again, like the ship over a mountain (Fitzcarraldo). When I use a digital effect, like at the end of Invincible where the strongman’s kid brother flies away across the ocean: it is so obvious, and so stylized, and embedded in the dialogue that it is no contradiction to what I like to achieve.
“I welcome the recreation of dinosaurs on the screen.
“Equally: everything which constitutes the hardcore identity of a protagonist in my “documentaries” I would not touch (Littlre Dieter Needs to Fly, Grizzlly Man, Wings of Hope, etc.). However, I do invent Dieter’s dreams, and I do stage elements of his character (otherwise not visible), like Dieter opening and closing the door of his home. This is the ecstatic truth of his existence.
“2. Whatever I can do to get beyond the mere facts…to get deeper into a story of a ‘documentary’…to grasp a truth in its ecstatic state, I will do. The story of Graham Dorrington remains untouched, the catastrophy which befell Dieter Plage, the cinematographer, during his maiden flight on board Dorrington’s airship, happened as narrated, yet: I liked a seemingly unimportant side figure, Mark Anthony Jhap so much that I manoeuvred him more and more into the center – or rather epicenter – of the film. The leading character shifts from Dorrington to Mark Anthony, and at the end to Mark Anthony’s splendid rooster.
“The scene where Mark Anthony leads the camera during his foraging trip to the waterfall, watching it through one single drop of water, is completely scripted, and staged, and rehearsed. From off camera I am asking the most insipid New Age question: ‘Mark Anthony, do you see a whole universe in one single drop of water’, and Mark Anthony turns around with a slight smirk on his face, and responds: ‘I cannot hear what you say for the thunder that you are.’ I believe I shot the scene 5 or 6 times until I got the right, almost imperceptible smirk.
“Mark Anthony’s sentence appears verbatim in a previous film,
“What you and your audience also should be aware of is the fact that the drop of water was not water, but glycerin which has better properties for filming. Klaus Scheurich, a very accomplished wildlife cinematographer, shot this drop of ‘water’ with the inverted waterfall caught in it, and this — at first sight — looked like kitsch, but I got hooked to the image, and I was convinced that this waterdrop embedded in an environment of sheer fantasy would assume a different, a higher, an ecstatic quality.
“I think that this delicate line between reality, and fact, and truth needs to be more clearly defined. My Minnesota Declaration (you’ll find it on my website) does this. But what has to be made more clear is: with the onslaught of virtual realities WE HAVE TO RE-DEFINE REALITY: beyond Cinema Verite, beyond the documen- taries we usually see on TV, beyond the terrain which is not solid any longer, as if we were treading on thin ice.” – Werner Herzog
Oh-Six Starters
There are four January releases that definitely cut the mustard in my pantry, and two or three with one or two problems but are recommended regardless. So things are starting off reasonably well. For a month known for so-so product, I mean.
The absolute must-see’s are Lajos Koltai’s Fateless (Thinkfilm, 1.6), Eugene Jarecki’s Why We Fight (Sony Pictures Classics, 1.20), Steven Soderbergh’s Bubble (Magnolia, 1.27) and Michael Winterbottom’s Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story (Picturehouse, 1.27).
From Lajos Koltai’s Fateless (and not what it seems to be)
The not-bad-with-reservations in order of preference are Ol Parker’s Imagine Me and You (Fox Searchlight, 1.27), Albert Brooks’ Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World (Warner Bros., 1.20) and Lars von Trier’s Manderlay (IFC Films, 1.27).
I’ve seen some others and can riff a bit about them, but aside from these six or seven we all know what January is about. That is, if you aren’t priveleged or con- nected enough to go to Sundance and you pay to see new movies in your local plex. It’s about feeling vaguely burned.
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Or it’s about catching up with Xmas films and watching more DVDs than usual or maybe picking up a book…but the mood that settles over a multiplex in January is rarely expectant, much less electric.
Here’s what I know, have heard or am deducing thus far…
January 6: Fateless is the first near-great film of 2006. The exquisite widescreen framing, desaturated color and exquisite editing make it, to my eyes, the most visually immaculate Holocaust death-camp drama ever made (does that sound right?) as well as one of the most realistic seeming and subtly-rendered in terms of story.
Based on Imre Kertesz’s mostly true-life account, it’s about a young Jewish boy from Budapest who ends up in a concentration camp during World War II and just barely survives. It lacks the story tension and rooting factor of Polanski’s The Pianist, but situations of hunger, despair and the ashy aura of near-death have never been rendered with such remarkable pictorial finesse.
Otherwise, I’ve been told by a young guy I completely trust that Grandma’s Boy is absolutely atrocious. I don’t know about BloodRayne except for the hot babe in the poster. I’ve seen the Hostel trailer and that’s as far as I go. Not a very brave or engaging attitude, I’ll admit. (I generally loathe horror films even though I rather liked Wolf Creek, which so many other critics were deeply offended by.)
January 13: The only one I’ve seen is Laurence Dunmore’s The Libertine (Weinstein Co.) and the less said about it, the better. Johnny Depp is utterly dislikable as a smart but self-destructive Old World asshole named John Wilmot, the second Earl of Rochester. Muddy, desaturated color…gobs of period detail without no discernible spark of life…an almost completely detestable film.
The trailer for Kevin Reynolds’ Tristan & Isolde (20th Century Fox)…oh, no….oh, no….Rufus Sewell is in it. I’m sorry but that tears it. And please…not another swords-and-horses romantic triangle King Arthur– slash-First Knight-type thing. How can studio executives greenlight this stuff and still look at themselves in the mirror?
James Franco (Tristan) is a very fine and charismatic actor who can’t seem to catch a wave, much less a break. (He’s also in Justin Lin’s Annapolis, opening on 1.27.) Sophia Myles, whom I liked in Art School Confidential, is a very intelligent, seemingly passionate actress with a very chubby moon face. Curvy, not-slim actresses are becoming more and more common these days, but there haven’t been any high-wattage moon-faced actresses since the days of Theda Bara.
Misty Wilkins, hot-stuff star of Steven Soderbergh’s Bubble
And zipposky on April’s Shower, Glory Road, Hoodwinked, Last Holiday, On The Outs.
January 20: Eugene Jarecki’s Why We Fight is not just the best film being released on this date but sure to be listed among the year’s (and probably the decade’s) finest also. A brilliantly told history of America’s military industrial complex and war machine. And very well made…well paced…totally blue-chip all the way. John McCain, Gore Vidal, William Kristol, Chalmers Johnson and Richard Perle are among the talking heads.
There are good things — more than a few good things — in Albert Brooks’ Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World (Warner Bros.). It’s dry and disciplined and somewhat amusing here and there, but it has an older guy’s energy levels and — frankly? — not that great a story.
You’d think a movie about what makes Muslims laugh would at least take a stab at answering this question. And it would have worked better if Brooks (playing himself) had somehow managed to visit the real Muslim world (Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, et. al.) instead of India, where most of this film takes place.
India is not where the terrorists are. Call for tech support and a very polite idiot who knows absolutely nothing about how to help you with your problem…that‘s India.
Albert Brooks (l.) in Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World
You know that Underworld: Evolution (Screen Gems), the Underword sequel, is solely about trying to grab a portion of the $100 million earned by the original. With Kate Beckinsdale and Scott Speedman reprising their roles, what are the odds of this being any more that the usual breathy-moldy-sexy CGI vampire-werewolf crap?
The trailer certainly gives every indication it’s a straight programmer and strictly a paycheck movie for the talent. If it rises even a tiny bit above the level of pure bilge I will buy a red rubber enema bag and do the appropriate thing.
Nothing about End of the Spear, Pizza, The Real Dirt on Farmer John.
January 27: Bubble is a minimalist murder tale from Steven Soderbergh, shot on video with non-pro actors. It’s a very clean, creepy and absorbing piece. It’s modest but damn fine within its perimeter. I consider Bubble Soderbergh’s return to form — the first high-grade wow thing he’s done since Traffic.
I wrote during the Toronto Film Festival that “as far as I’m concerned Bubble, a heart-of-proletariat-darkness drama, is reason to pop open the champagne and breathe easy. Soderbergh was falling off the horse repeatedly with Full Frontal, Solaris and the two Ocean‘s movies…but he hunkered down and stayed with the process and that constant-state-of-becoming trip that all artists need to be into, and now he’s back.”
Oh Parker’s Imagine Me and You, which I saw at Toronto, is one of those rotely British romantic confections, although nowhere near as sickening as Love Actually and for the most part a reasonably decent and even (at times) touching thing.
It’s about a woman (Piper Parabo) who falls in love with another woman (Lena Headley) on her wedding day…which leaves her husband Heck (Matthew Goode) confused and out in the cold. It’s formulaic and tidy, although at times I could feel the capability on Parker’s part (if not the willingness) to make a complex adult relationship drama along the lines of John Schlesinger’s Sunday Bloody Sunday.
I didn’t hear a single unkind word about Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story during the Toronto Film Festival, so even though I didn’t see it myself it seems like a reasonably safe call to put it on the recommend list.
It’s basically the bone-dry British funnyman Steve Coogan starring in some kind of smart-ass variation of Karel Reisz’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1982). It’s a film about the making of an historical film — an adaptation of Laurence Stern’s “The Life and Opinions of Tristram Sahndy, Gentlemen” — while at the same time a look at the historical characters as well as the actors portraying them.
Willem Dafoe, Bryce Dallas Howard in Lars von Trier’s Manderlay
After seeing Lars von Trier’s Manderlay in Cannes last May I wrote that “it didn’t do it for me, and I’m speaking as a totally ardent fan of von Trier’s Dogville, Dancer in the Dark and Breaking the Waves, as well as being a general fool for his bad-boy provocations.
“It’s a relentlessly talky, intelligent and provocative film that addresses…well, American racism, certainly, but more generally a do-gooder tendency by American governments to try and shape other societies so they more resemble our own (Iraq, Vietnam, etc.). And it indulges in the usual proddings and agitations that are par for this Danish filmmaker.
“The second installment in von Trier’s America trilogy, Manderlay is a continuation of the adventures of Grace, the gangster’s daughter played by Nicole Kidman in Dogville, the trilogy’s 2003 kickoff, and by Bryce Dallas Howard in the new film.
Sophia Miles, James Franco in Kevin Reynolds’ Tristan and Isolde
“Both films are stagey and pedantically inclined, and shot on what is probably the same massive sound stage with imaginary props and sets. (The third installment will presumably follow suit.)
“Manderlay is too similar to Dogville and not similar enough. Despite its slow pace and too-gradual plot development, Dogville had a surprise revelation (Kidman is the daughter of gangster James Caan, and not his girlfriend, as the film allows us to assume at first) and a shockingly violent finale that expressed von Trier’s negative feelings about what he sees as American tendencies to exploit the less fortunate.
“Like Dogville it’s broken up by titled chapters, John Hurt again provides the dry and pungent narration, and the closing credit sequence is nearly identical with the same David Bowie song (‘Young Americans’) played over a series of stills that illuminate the uglier aspects of America’s history — in this instance the treatment of African-Americans over the last century or so.
“But there’s no big jolt or surprise at the finale — you can pretty much tell what’s coming from the get-go — and it so closely recalls Dogville‘s aching-butt aspects that watching it feels like a chore.
Eugene Jarecki discussing Why We Fight at the 2005 Sundance Film Festival
Otherwise…
Annapolis isn’t a precise revisiting of An Officer and a Gentleman but it’s obviously on similar turf with the element of boxing thrown in. Annapolis, boxing…Annapolis, boxing. Better Luck Tomorrow helmer Justin Lin is the director, and I should just keep my mouth shut until I see it.
Big Momma’s House 2 can have coitus with itself. Breaking News looks to me like a standard-issue Hong Kong cop thriller, and I’m not vigorous enough to try and figure the real truth of it. Mirage, Nanny McPhee and the IMAX film Roving Mars haven’t yet come into focus.
You don’t have confuse Tristram Shandy with Tristan and Isolde — “Tristram” has two r’s and the movie is fairly jaunty and flip, and the other one is bold-faced sincere.
Grabs
(l. to r.) Occasional Hollywood Elsewhere columnist Dylan Wells, Becca Payne and producer-screenwriter L.M. Kit Carson at Columbia student bar at Broadway and 113th Street — Tuesday, 12.27, 10:15 pm
On IRT Lexington uptown — Saturday, 12.24, 3:10 pm.
Troubador in waiting area for Union Square L line to Brooklyn — Monday, 12.26, 11:25 pm.
$30 jar of ginger orange foam scrub, purchased at Sabon on Spring Street on Sunday, 12.25, 8:40 pm.
Mott Street in Little Italy — Thursday, 12.29, 8:20 pm.
Canal Street near Manhattan Bridge — Thursday, 12.29, 7:15 pm.
Grand Central Station — Tuesday, 12.27, 4:25 pm.
On L train heading to Brooklyn — Tuesday, 1.27, 11:45 pm
What would Nic Cage (or a character played by him), Joan of Arc and Oliver Reed’s “Father Grandier” character in The Devils have in common? Something, I think…unless Neil Labute has decided to re-shuffle the story of The Wicker Man.
Thurday, 12.29, 8:15 pm.
Herzog vs. Huffman
“Thanks for celebrating Werner Herzog, the most amazing director working today. However…
“While I don’t disagree with you and Time‘s Richard Corliss for celebrating his little seen recent, wonderful documentary The White Diamond, I wonder if you were aware just how contrived the film is.
“Recently Herzog was in Seattle for a short festival of some of his recent films and in the q & a session afterwards he explained that pretty much everything said in the interview sessions in the film (particularly from the talkative local man who owned the rooster) was completely scripted.
“Herzog said it in way that made it seem like he would be stunned if anyone could possibly think it was done any other way. He described in detail how he wrote complete speeches for the folks and how they would struggle to deliver them (the speeches are basically based on his conversations with the interviewees and Herzog’s own thoughts).
“If anything, knowing that this is how Herzog constructs his documentaries makes me like them even more. All documentaries are a succession of lies that form a particular person’s greater truth. I am just surprised that Herzog seemed to assume that everyone else was in on the secret.” — Richard Huffman, Seattle, WA.
Werner Herzog replies: “Jeffrey — [Huffman’s] questions about The White Diamond are too simplified. Why would I who postulates a cinema where you can trust your eyes again (Fitzcarraldo) ‘concoct’ elements of his ‘documentaries’?
“My inventions and stylizations aim to penetrate into a deeper truth, whereas Reality TV only pretends to depict the ‘real’ but captures just facts, and not truth.
“I have to be more precise to distinguish between two major issues:
“1. Whenever it comes to visual material, I want audiences to trust their eyes again, like the ship over a mountain (Fitzcarraldo). When I use a digital effect, like at the end of Invincible where the strongman’s kid brother flies away across the ocean: it is so obvious, and so stylized, and embedded in the dialogue that it is no contradiction to what I like to achieve.
“I welcome the recreation of dinosaurs on the screen.
“Equally: everything which constitutes the hardcore identity of a protagonist in my “documentaries” I would not touch (Littlre Dieter Needs to Fly, Grizzlly Man, Wings of Hope, etc.). However, I do invent Dieter’s dreams, and I do stage elements of his character (otherwise not visible), like Dieter opening and closing the door of his home. This is the ecstatic truth of his existence.
“2. Whatever I can do to get beyond the mere facts…to get deeper into a story of a ‘documentary’…to grasp a truth in its ecstatic state, I will do. The story of Graham Dorrington remains untouched, the catastrophy which befell Dieter Plage, the cinematographer, during his maiden flight on board Dorrington’s airship, happened as narrated, yet: I liked a seemingly unimportant side figure, Mark Anthony Jhap so much that I manoeuvred him more and more into the center – or rather epicenter – of the film. The leading character shifts from Dorrington to Mark Anthony, and at the end to Mark Anthony’s splendid rooster.
“The scene where Mark Anthony leads the camera during his foraging trip to the waterfall, watching it through one single drop of water, is completely scripted, and staged, and rehearsed. From off camera I am asking the most insipid New Age question: ‘Mark Anthony, do you see a whole universe in one single drop of water’, and Mark Anthony turns around with a slight smirk on his face, and responds: ‘I cannot hear what you say for the thunder that you are.’ I believe I shot the scene 5 or 6 times until I got the right, almost imperceptible smirk.
“Mark Anthony’s sentence appears verbatim in a previous film,
“What you and your audience also should be aware of is the fact that the drop of water was not water, but glycerin which has better properties for filming. Klaus Scheurich, a very accomplished wildlife cinematographer, shot this drop of ‘water’ with the inverted waterfall caught in it, and this — at first sight — looked like kitsch, but I got hooked to the image, and I was convinced that this waterdrop embedded in an environment of sheer fantasy would assume a different, a higher, an ecstatic quality.
“I think that this delicate line between reality, and fact, and truth needs to be more clearly defined. My Minnesota Declaration (you’ll find it on my website) does this. But what has to be made more clear is: with the onslaught of virtual realities WE HAVE TO RE-DEFINE REALITY: beyond Cinema Verite, beyond the documen- taries we usually see on TV, beyond the terrain which is not solid any longer, as if we were treading on thin ice.” – Werner Herzog
Oh-Six Starters
There are four January releases that definitely cut the mustard in my pantry, and two or three with one or two problems but are recommended regardless. So things are starting off reasonably well. For a month known for so-so product, I mean.
The absolute must-see’s are Lajos Koltai’s Fateless (Thinkfilm, 1.6), Eugene Jarecki’s Why We Fight (Sony Pictures Classics, 1.20), Steven Soderbergh’s Bubble (Magnolia, 1.27) and Michael Winterbottom’s Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story (Picturehouse, 1.27).
From Lajos Koltai’s Fateless (and not what it seems to be)
The not-bad-with-reservations in order of preference are Ol Parker’s Imagine Me and You (Fox Searchlight, 1.27), Albert Brooks’ Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World (Warner Bros., 1.20) and Lars von Trier’s Manderlay (IFC Films, 1.27).
I’ve seen some others and can riff a bit about them, but aside from these six or seven we all know what January is about. That is, if you aren’t priveleged or con- nected enough to go to Sundance and you pay to see new movies in your local plex. It’s about feeling vaguely burned.
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Or it’s about catching up with Xmas films and watching more DVDs than usual or maybe picking up a book…but the mood that settles over a multiplex in January is rarely expectant, much less electric.
Here’s what I know, have heard or am deducing thus far…
January 6: Fateless is the first near-great film of 2006. The exquisite wide-screen framing, destaurated color and exquisite editing make it, to my eyes, the most visually immaculate Holocaust death-camp drama ever made as well as one of the most realistic seeming and subtly-rendered in terms of story.
Based on Imre Kertesz’s mostly true-life account, it’s about a young Jewish boy from Budapest who ends up in a concentration camp during World War II and just barely survives. It lacks the story tension and rooting factor of Polanski’s The Pianist, but situations of hunger, despair and the ashy aura of near-death have never been rendered with such remarkable pictorial finesse.
Otherwise, I’ve been told by a young guy I completely trust that Grandma’s Boy is absolutely atrocious. I don’t know about BloodRayne except for the hot babe in the poster. I’ve seen the Hostel trailer and that’s as far as I go. Not a very brave or engaging attitude, I’ll admit. (I generally loathe horror films even though I rather liked Wolf Creek, which so many other critics were deeply offended by.)
January 13: The only one I’ve seen is Laurence Dunmore’s The Libertine (Weinstein Co.) and the less said about it, the better. Johnny Depp is utterly dislikable as a smart but self-destructive Old World asshole named John Wilmot, the second Earl of Rochester. Muddy, desaturated color…gobs of period detail without no discernible spark of life…an almost completely detestable film.
The trailer for Kevin Reynolds’ Tristan & Isolde (20th Century Fox)…oh, no….oh, no….Rufus Sewell is in it. I’m sorry but that tears it. And please…not another swords-and-horses romantic triangle King Arthur– slash-First Knight-type deal. How can studio executives greenlight these things and still look themselves in the mirror?
James Franco (Tristan) is a very fine and charismatic actor who can’t seem to catch a wave, much less a break. (He’s also in Justin Lin’s Annapolis, opening on 1.27.) Sophia Myles, whom I liked in Art School Confidential, is a very intelligent, seemingly passionate actress with a very chubby moon face. Curvy, not-slim actresses are becoming more and more common these days, but there haven’t been any high-wattage moon-faced actresses since the days of Theda Bara.
Misty Wilkins, hot-stuff star of Steven Soderbergh’s Bubble
And zipposky on April’s Shower, Glory Road, Hoodwinked, Last Holiday, On The Outs.
January 20: Eugene Jarecki’s Why We Fight is not just the best film being released on this date but sure to be listed among the year’s (and probably the decade’s) finest also. A brilliantly told history of America’s military industrial complex and war machine. And very well made…well paced…totally blue-chip all the way. John McCain, Gore Vidal, William Kristol, Chalmers Johnson and Richard Perle are among the talking heads.
There are good things — more than a few good things — in Albert Brooks’ Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World (Warner Bros.). It’s dry and disciplined and somewhat amusing here and there, but it has an older guy’s energy levels and — frankly? — not that great a story.
You’d think a movie about what makes Muslims laugh would at least take a stab at answering this question. And it would have worked better if Brooks (playing himself) had somehow managed to visit the real Muslim world (Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, et. al.) instead of India, where most of this film takes place. India is not where the terrorists are. Call for tech support and a very polite idiot who knows absolutely nothing about how to help you with your problem…that‘s India.
Albert Brooks (l.) in Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World
You know what Underworld: Evolution (Screen Gems), the Underword sequel, is just a cynical money grab because Underworld made $100 million or so. It looks to me like more breathy-moldy-sexy CGI vampire-werewolf crap with Kate Beckinsdale and Scott Speedman.
The trailer certainly gives every indication it’s a programmer and strictly a paycheck movie for the talent. If it rises even a tiny bit above the level of pure bilge I will buy a red rubber enema bag and do the appropriate thing.
Nothing about End of the Spear, Pizza, The Real Dirt on Farmer John.
January 27: Bubble is a minimalist murder tale from Steven Soderbergh, shot on video with non-pro actors. It’s a very clean, creepy and absorbing piece. It’s modest but damn fine within its perimeter. I consider Bubble Soderbergh’s return to form — the first high-grade wow thing he’s done since Traffic.
I wrote during the Toronto Film Festival that “as far as I’m concerned Bubble, a heart-of-proletariat-darkness drama, is reason to pop open the champagne and breathe easy. Soderbergh was falling off the horse repeatedly with Full Frontal, Solaris and the two Ocean‘s movies…but he hunkered down and stayed with the process and that constant-state-of-becoming trip that all artists need to be into, and now he’s back.”
Oh Parker’s Imagine Me and You, which I saw at Toronto, is one of those rotely British romantic confections, although nowhere near as sickening as Love Actually and for the most part a reasonably decent and even (at times) touching thing.
It’s about a woman (Piper Parabo) who falls in love with another woman (Lena Headley) on her wedding day…which leaves her husband Heck (Matthew Goode) confused and out in the cold. It’s formulaic and tidy, although at times I could feel the capability on Parker’s part (if not the willingness) to make a complex adult relationship drama along the lines of John Schlesinger’s Sunday Bloody Sunday.
I didn’t hear a single unkind word about Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story during the Toronto Film Festival, so even though I didn’t see it myself it seems like a reasonably safe call to put it on the recommend list.
It’s basically the bone-dry British funnyman Steve Coogan starring in some kind of smart-ass variation of Karel Reisz’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1982). It’s a film about the making of an historical film — an adaptation of Laurence Stern’s “The Life and Opinions of Tristram Sahndy, Gentlemen” — while at the same time a look at the historical characters as well as the actors portraying them.
Willem Dafoe, Bryce Dallas Howard in Lars von Trier’s Manderlay
After seeing Lars von Trier’s Manderlay in Cannes last May I wrote that “it didn’t do it for me, and I’m speaking as a totally ardent fan of von Trier’s Dogville, Dancer in the Dark and Breaking the Waves, as well as being a general fool for his bad-boy provocations.
“It’s a relentlessly talky, intelligent and provocative film that addresses…well, American racism, certainly, but more generally a do-gooder tendency by American governments to try and shape other societies so they more resemble our own (Iraq, Vietnam, etc.). And it indulges in the usual proddings and agitations that are par for this Danish filmmaker.
“The second installment in von Trier’s America trilogy, Manderlay is a continuation of the adventures of Grace, the gangster’s daughter played by Nicole Kidman in Dogville, the trilogy’s 2003 kickoff, and by Bryce Dallas Howard in the new film.
Sophia Miles, James Franco in Kevin Reynolds’ Tristan and Isolde
“Both films are stagey and pedantically inclined, and shot on what is probably the same massive sound stage with imaginary props and sets. (The third installment will presumably follow suit.)
“Manderlay is too similar to Dogville and not similar enough. Despite its slow pace and too-gradual plot development, Dogville had a surprise revelation (Kidman is the daughter of gangster James Caan, and not his girlfriend, as the film allows us to assume at first) and a shockingly violent finale that expressed von Trier’s negative feelings about what he sees as American tendencies to exploit the less fortunate.
“Manderlay is obviously man to play as a Dogville companion. It is broken up by titled chapters, John Hurt again provides the dry and pungent narration, and the closing credit sequence is nearly identical with the same David Bowie song (‘Young Americans’) played over a series of stills that illuminate the uglier aspects of America’s history — in this instance the treatment of African-Americans over the last century or so.
“But there’s no big jolt or surprise at the finale — you can pretty much tell what’s coming from the get-go — and it so closely recalls Dogville‘s aching-butt aspects that watching it feels like a chore.
Eugene Jarecki discussing Why We Fight at the 2005 Sundance Film Festival
Otherwise…
Annapolis isn’t a precise revisiting of An Officer and a Gentleman but it’s obviously on similar turf with the element of boxing thrown in. Annapolis, boxing…Anapolis, boxing. Better Luck Tomorrow helmer Justin Lin is the director, and I should keep my mouth shut until I see it.
Big Momma’s House 2 can have coitus with itself. Breaking News looks to me like a standard-issue Hong Kong cop thriller, and I’m not vigorous enough to try and figure the real truth of it. Mirage, Nanny McPhee and the IMAX film Roving Mars haven’t yet come into focus.
You don’t have confuse Tristram Shandy with Tristan and Isolde — “Tristram” has two r’s and the movie is fairly jaunty and flip, and the other one is bold-faced sincere.
Grabs
(l. to r.) Occasional Hollywood Elsewhere columnist Dylan Wells, Becca Payne and producer-screenwriter L.M. Kit Carson at Columbia student bar at Broadway and 113th Street — Tuesday, 12.27, 10:15 pm
On IRT Lexington uptown — Saturday, 12.24, 3:10 pm.
Troubador in waiting area for Union Square L line to Brooklyn — Monday, 12.26, 11:25 pm.
$30 jar of ginger orange foam scrub, purchased at Sabon on Spring Street on Sunday, 12.25, 8:40 pm.
Mott Street in Little Italy — Thursday, 12.29, 8:20 pm.
Canal Street near Manhattan Bridge — Thursday, 12.29, 7:15 pm.
Grand Central Station — Tuesday, 12.27, 4:25 pm.
On L train heading to Brooklyn — Tuesday, 1.27, 11:45 pm
What would Nic Cage (or a character played by him), Joan of Arc and Oliver Reed’s “Father Grandier” character in The Devils have in common? Something, I think…unless Neil Labute has decided to re-shuffle the story of The Wicker Man.
Thurday, 12.29, 8:15 pm.
Herzog vs. Huffman
“Thanks for celebrating Werner Herzog, the most amazing director working today. However…
“While I don’t disagree with you and Time‘s Richard Corliss for celebrating his little seen recent, wonderful documentary The White Diamond, I wonder if you were aware just how contrived the film is.
“Recently Herzog was in Seattle for a short festival of some of his recent films and in the q & a session afterwards he explained that pretty much everything said in the interview sessions in the film (particularly from the talkative local man who owned the rooster) was completely scripted.
“Herzog said it in way that made it seem like he would be stunned if anyone could possibly think it was done any other way. He described in detail how he wrote complete speeches for the folks and how they would struggle to deliver them (the speeches are basically based on his conversations with the interviewees and Herzog’s own thoughts).
“If anything, knowing that this is how Herzog constructs his documentaries makes me like them even more. All documentaries are a succession of lies that form a particular person’s greater truth. I am just surprised that Herzog seemed to assume that everyone else was in on the secret.” — Richard Huffman, Seattle, WA.
Werner Herzog replies: “Jeffrey — [Huffman’s] questions about The White Diamond are too simplified. Why would I who postulates a cinema where you can trust your eyes again (Fitzcarraldo) ‘concoct’ elements of his ‘documentaries’?
“My inventions and stylizations aim to penetrate into a deeper truth, whereas Reality TV only pretends to depict the ‘real’ but captures just facts, and not truth.
“I have to be more precise to distinguish between two major issues:
“1. Whenever it comes to visual material, I want audiences to trust their eyes again, like the ship over a mountain (Fitzcarraldo). When I use a digital effect, like at the end of Invincible where the strongman’s kid brother flies away across the ocean: it is so obvious, and so stylized, and embedded in the dialogue that it is no contradiction to what I like to achieve.
“I welcome the recreation of dinosaurs on the screen.
“Equally: everything which constitutes the hardcore identity of a protagonist in my “documentaries” I would not touch (Littlre Dieter Needs to Fly, Grizzlly Man, Wings of Hope, etc.). However, I do invent Dieter’s dreams, and I do stage elements of his character (otherwise not visible), like Dieter opening and closing the door of his home. This is the ecstatic truth of his existence.
“2. Whatever I can do to get beyond the mere facts…to get deeper into a story of a ‘documentary’…to grasp a truth in its ecstatic state, I will do. The story of Graham Dorrington remains untouched, the catastrophy which befell Dieter Plage, the cinematographer, during his maiden flight on board Dorrington’s airship, happened as narrated, yet: I liked a seemingly unimportant side figure, Mark Anthony Jhap so much that I manoeuvred him more and more into the center – or rather epicenter – of the film. The leading character shifts from Dorrington to Mark Anthony, and at the end to Mark Anthony’s splendid rooster.
“The scene where Mark Anthony leads the camera during his foraging trip to the waterfall, watching it through one single drop of water, is completely scripted, and staged, and rehearsed. From off camera I am asking the most insipid New Age question: ‘Mark Anthony, do you see a whole universe in one single drop of water’, and Mark Anthony turns around with a slight smirk on his face, and responds: ‘I cannot hear what you say for the thunder that you are.’ I believe I shot the scene 5 or 6 times until I got the right, almost imperceptible smirk.
“Mark Anthony’s sentence appears verbatim in a previous film,
“What you and your audience also should be aware of is the fact that the drop of water was not water, but glycerin which has better properties for filming. Klaus Scheurich, a very accomplished wildlife cinematographer, shot this drop of ‘water’ with the inverted waterfall caught in it, and this — at first sight — looked like kitsch, but I got hooked to the image, and I was convinced that this waterdrop embedded in an environment of sheer fantasy would assume a different, a higher, an ecstatic quality.
“I think that this delicate line between reality, and fact, and truth needs to be more clearly defined. My Minnesota Declaration (you’ll find it on my website) does this. But what has to be made more clear is: with the onslaught of virtual realities WE HAVE TO RE-DEFINE REALITY: beyond Cinema Verite, beyond the documen- taries we usually see on TV, beyond the terrain which is not solid any longer, as if we were treading on thin ice.” – Werner Herzog
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