Excellent news on the Best Actress nomination front for The Upside of Anger‘s Joan Allen, whom I went to town for last weekend in a lead Elsewhere feature. Allen is now in sixth place on MCN’s “Gurus of Gold” Best Actress nominee list, right behind non-actress Keira Knightley, who’s been bizarrely favored for some reason because of her looks and coy charm deployment in Pride and Prejudice. Knightley lovers should ask themselves how much better that film would have been with Rachel McAdams, a real actress, playing Knightley’s character. I admit Allen is far behind with only 24 points to Knightley’s 75, and only Thelma Adams and Peter Howell have put her on their lists besides me. All I know is, the top four nominees (Witherspoon, Dench, Huffman, Theron) are untrashable and deserve to be there. But it’s time to quit piddling around and face reality and admit that Knightley doesn’t rate. I shouldn’t have to point out that being young and foxy and having bewitching eyes ain’t enough, but maybe I need to.
Match Guilt
I’m feel I should be beating the drum more loudly for Woody Allen’s Match Point (DreamWorks, 12.25) because it’s not just his best in a long time, but one of the best of the year. And I need to stop being wimpy about this.
It really is Allen’s darkest and most precisely calibrated film since Crime and Misdemeanors…clean, cruel and ironic as hell.
Scarlett Johansson, Jonathan Rhys-Meyers in Woody Allen’s Match Point
Any film worth its salt has to have thematic clarity. Match Point‘s theme is clear as a friggin’ bell, and with echoes of George Stevens’ A Place in the Sun and Fyodor Dostoevsky’s “Crime and Punishment,” and it boils down to this:
Be smart and vigilant in life, and maybe you’ll get what you want, or what you think you need. But if you want things to really turn out, be lucky.
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People hate this notion because it means our lives are little silver balls whirling around a roulette wheel. Maybe we’ll plop into a red or black slot at the right time, or into an odd or even number at the wrong time…and maybe something amazing or comical or devastating will come of it. Life is cold, man.
If there wasn’t such a herd mentality in this town, if people weren’t so political and equivocal, Match Point could actually be in the mix for Best Picture.
It’s a slightly better film than Good Night, and Good Luck. It’s not as much of a sad and broken-hearted thing as Brokeback Mountain, but it has as much confidence and self-awareness as Walk the Line. It’s five or ten times better than Memoirs of a Giesha, and the Munich comparisons will soon be clear.
The Italian one-sheet…right?
Let’s be really honest. I’m not ballsy enough to stand up for the Woody all alone, partly because deep down I’m only 90% supportive of Match Point (I have some problems with this and that aspect, but nothing humungous), but I feel bolder with Oscar prognosticators Pete Hammond, Sasha Stone and Eugene Hernandez listing it among their top five.
So I guess I’m like Bobby Kennedy after Eugene McCarthy got 42% of the vote in the 1968 New Hampshire primary against Lyndon Johnson. I’m going, “Uhh, okay …there’s something happening here and I’m joining the insurrectionists.”
Screw the herd mentality and the hell with political and equivocal. The more I think about Match Point, the better it seems. Woody is easily a Best Original Screen- play contender, and…well, at least that.
I said last May at the Cannes Film Festival that Match Point isn’t quite as good as Woody’s Crimes and Misdemeanors, but it deals the same kind of cards and has its footing in more or less the same philosophical realm.
And I’ve said this three or four times, but the finale kills.
Set in present-day England (mostly London, Match Point is about a tennis instruc- tor namd Chris Wilton (Jonathan Rhys- Meyers) who relationships his way into an upper-crust English family by way of one of his male students, a cheerful smoothie named Tom Hewett (Matthew Goode).
Chris is soon romancing and then marrying Tom’s sister Chloe (Emily Mortimer), but almost-as-quickly getting involved with Tom’s fiance, a struggling American actress named Nola Rice (Scarlett Johansson).
The story essentially turns on the matter of Nola becoming pregnant and insisting that Chris leave his wife for her, and how Chris deals with the pressure of this.
Rhys-Meyers handles his part skillfully and with exactly the right balance between terrible, gut-wrenching guilt and the suggestion of a sociopathic undercurrent. But it’s Johansson, far and away, who gives the finest performance. She seems in possession of a fierce, almost Brando-esque naturalism here. She grabs Allen’s dialogue by the shirt collar and slaps it around.
Match Point feels a bit creaky from time to time. The talk feels a little pat here and there, and certain aspects of the plot feel a wee bit forced. But that’s Woody these days, and in this instance, that’s pretty damn good.
Sense of Gravity
Do today’s African-American actors radiate a graver, weightier aura…a stronger sense of manly conviction than white actors these days? Do they seem more rooted, less whimsical…more dependably earnest?
Or has it always been this way and white-guy columnists like myself are only just waking up to this? Or is the whole idea bogus and agenda-driven?
Would Mekhi Phifer have been better as Ennis del Mar or Jack Twist?
I got started on this theory when a New York-area guy named Richard Szathmary suggested this morning that if two black actors — Mekhi Phifer and Sharif Atkins, say — had played the kissin’ cowboys in Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain (Focus Features, 12.9) that reactions among younger-male heteros might be less squeamish.
I’m referring to under-25s in both Flyover Country and in the big cities guffawing derisively at the film’s teaser-trailer. (I really hate bringing up this asinine reaction, but I’ve been told about it time and again.)
The feeling is that Atkins and Phifer falling for each other would somehow seem solemn and steady and take-it-to-the-bank.
That’s how it seems to Szathmary, at least…a guy who hasn’t seen seen Brokeback Mountain but has his suspicions based on the trailer…a notion that there’s something vaguely flakey and untrustworthy about Jake Gyllenhaal and Heath Ledger. Something in their eyes, manner…something deep down.
I’ve seen Brokeback and I completely disagree. Ledger and Gyllenhaal totally inhabit their characters and then some, revving their emotional engines to a high pitch.
It wouldn’t have quite worked, in any case, to have a couple of black actors playing sheepherders-for-hire in a film that begins in the early ’60s, given the relatively few people of color known to have worked the open range forty or forty-five years agi, not to mention the conservative-racist mentality of big-time ranchers back then.
Sharif Atkins
And I can’t help wondering if Ang Lee and James Schamus would have been able to find a pair of marquee-worthy black actors if they’d said “Fine, let’s cast it this way.” The machismo factor among African-American actors is thought to be pretty high. Remember Will Smith’s reaction to briefly kissing a guy in Six Degrees of Separation?
But maybe Szathmary is onto something anyway.
The more I think about these guys and whatever that thing is they seem to possess, the more solid this idea seems.
I’m thinking of a list that includes (but certainly isn’t limited to) Terrence Howard, Don Cheadle, Denzel Washington, Mos Def, Jamie Foxx, Samuel L. Jackson, Phifer, Taye Diggs, Ludacris, Delroy Lindo, Bill Duke, Ving Rhames, Atkins, Ice Cube, Lawrence Fishburne, Sean Patrick Thomas, Henry Simmons, Keith Hamilton Cobb.
I could even include even Sean Combs, whom I believed as a death-row inmate in Monster’s Ball, despite his not being much of an actor.
“The American cinema is dominated by commanding black males,” wrote Szathmary. “Men whom one can picture as real men. Guys who don’t whine and have real voices and calmly and capably make their moves and get things done.”
As the risk of sounding like a cultural bubble-dweller or zombie of some kind, there’s something to this view. A feeling that there’s something more dependable and rock-solid about black guys…except when it comes to Martin Lawrence, the dandified Will Smith and that guy who played the sick-fuck Little Ze in City of God.
Jamie Foxx
At the same time the notion that guys with darker skin have it all over guys of European heritage sounds simplistic and dumb-assed.
On the other hand there was a voice inside me that said “cool” when that fast-flurry rumor popped up last year about Colin Salmon being one of the finalists being tapped to play 007.
I could riff some more about about this and call up ten or fifteen producers, agents and casting directors and chew it over with them, but let’s just throw this one out and get some reader reactions.
Joan and Toni
L.A. City Beat film critic Andy Klein came on “Elsewhere Live” last night (i.e., Thursday) to talk about the leading Best Actress contenders, and all the verbal sifting-through led me to realize something I hadn’t quite come to on my own:
The two finest waker-upper female performances of the year are both underdogs. One isn’t being spoken of very much, and the other isn’t even on the map.
I’m speaking of Joan Allen’s alcoholic, emotionally off-balance mother of four girls in Mike Binder’s The Upside of Anger and Toni Collette’s stressed, hurting, buoy- ant Philadelphia attorney in Curtis Hanson’s In Her Shoes.
Kevin Costner, Joan Allen in The Upside of Anger
Allen is sitting on a few Oscar prognosticator “maybe” lists, but not so you’d notice. It’s high time to refresh the browser. There’s an emotional hair-trigger element that Allen gets hold of in Anger that feels almost giddy at times. She’s bracing and sexy, willful and vulnerable and quirky. (And let’s not forget how sublime she was in Sally Potter’s Yes.)
No one anywhere is talking about Collette at all. Obviously people disagree with my feelings about her. Maybe In Her Shoes getting only a 75% positive rating on Rotten Tomatoes had its effect, and maybe the underwhelming box office was a factor, or Fox not going to bat for Collette with trade ads…whatever.
I know what exceptional in-the-pocket acting is — I know what it feels like, sounds like — and I know plenty of others who feel this way, and those who’ve dismissed Collette’s performance out-of-hand are just being slackers.
Allen and Collette’s performances are funny, sad, joyful, exuberant. They raise the emotional thermometer and have all kinds of ins and outs, and the plain simple truth is that none of the other supposed contenders (i.e., the ones on everyone’s lists) are in their realm.
I believe this because…
Toni Collette in In Her Shoes
Reason #1: Reese Witherspoon, the presumed front-runner for her fine inhabiting of June Carter in Walk the Line, gives an assured movie-star performance…yes. Her acting is robust and and authentically down-home. She does more with less and is quite radiant and likable, and she sings like an angel. And she’s almost a supporting character (I said “almost”). And she doesn’t have one of those hair- pulling, “look ma, I’m acting” scenes to work with either.
But at the same time Witherspoon isn’t exactly pushing her boundaries or rewriting the book on acting. She’s great but c’mon…
Reason #2: Judi Dench, another presumed front-runner for her playing a spirited upper-class snob in Mrs. Henderson Presents, can do this sort of thing in her sleep. Academy people always kowtow to world-class British actresses when they get hold of a good part, and that’s happening here. Like I said a few weeks ago, Dench “has a pitch-perfect way of delivering zap lines with just the right tone of upper-class indifference, and yet the joke is always on her.” But it’s a performance that’s straight out of her kit bag.
Reason #3: Sarah Jessica Parker is the one who goes through the big character journey in The Family Stone, starting out all rigid and butt-plugged and then evol- ving into somone calmer and more centered. But she’s not in Witherspoon’s class, much less Allen’s or Collette’s (in part because of how her character is written).
Reese Witehspoon in Walk the Line
Reason #4: Charlize Theron gives an impassioned, balls-out, tough-as-nails performance in North Country, but the movie, a fairly solid drama on its own terms, didn’t cause much of a stir when it came out, and people feel a little Charlize-d out from the Monster hoopla of…what was it, two years ago?
Reason #5: This is a non-reason, but I haven’t seen Felicity Huffman playing a man undergoing a gender-switch procedure in Transamerica, so she’s off the table for now.
Reason #6: Keira Knightley doesn’t have that element of a-churning-river-running- through-her…not at all…not in Pride & Prejudice, and not in any performance she’s given in any film so far. It’s vaguely silly that people have even put her on their lists. Just forget it.
Reason #7: Ziyi Zhang is a barely emotive presence in Memoirs of a Geisha. She’s all makeup and porcelain and dropping her gaze to the ground. She’s young and vigorous and great on her feet with a sword, but quiet acting isn’t her game. She may get swept along in the current of all the below-the-line nominations that Geisha is expected to receive, but she doesn’t deliver on her own and that’s a fact.
Charlize Theron in North Country
Reason #8: Claire Danes doesn’t have nearly enough to work with in Shopgirl, and her character’s a bit opaque and the movie’s underwhelming, so forget it.
Reason #9: Gwyneth Paltrow’s daughter-of-Anthony-Hopkins character in Proof is too gloomy and self-involved. That was my reaction, at least — I felt she was too wrapped up in her woe-is-me blanket, and I found that off-putting after a while. The film has its moments and Paltrow’s performance has merit, but it’s a stretch to talk about Oscar contention.
Reason #10: The White Countess is said to have more than a few problems so however good Natasha Richardson may be, a nomination doesn’t seem to be in the cards.
Reason #11: It’s a little early to say anything, but the word around the campfire is that the same equation may apply to notions of Q’orianka Kilcher being singled out for her work in The New World.
I said no other female performance this year was quite in Allen and Collette’s realm. That isn’t entirely accurate if you allow Robin Wright Penn’s brief but startling turn in Rodrigo Garcia’s Nine Lives into the mix.
Wright Penn may not be on-screen long enough to qualify for contention in the Best Supporting Actress category (in people’s heads, I mean) but she’s absolutely mesmerizing in this film. I wrote about it in October (scroll to the bottom of the page).
Jason Isaacs, Robin Wright Penn in Nine Lives
Forget It
Forget that whole Sundance Film Festival ’06 thing I posted in this section a few days ago, and in the main column last Saturday. Almost all of it was wrong and that’s that.
I’ve been reliably persuaded that a good portion of the titles I mentioned won’t be at the festival, and that some weren’t even submitted (!).
Five or six days ago a friend from the festival circuit sent me a document put together by Film Finders called “Tipped for Sundance,” and it had those 22 films listed.
I went for the information because (a) the Film Finders people are known to be fairly well connected on a business affairs level, (b) the document was passed along only a few days before the official announcements (the trades will be running the stories this week), (c) the document “looked” superficially reliable — it had production info history, sales contact info and phone numbers for each film — and (d) the combined reptutations of Film Finders and the guy who sent me the document convinced me the information was probably jake.
And for the most part, it wasn’t.
Fist in the Air
“I finally got a chance to catch Rent yesterday and wanted to let you that your review in your 11.9 column absolutely nailed it. Columbus did a helluva job transferring this thing to the screen and I agree it worked better in many ways than the play.
“Film allows the viewer to peer deep into its characters souls in a way that the stage (for all its vitality) cannot, and Columbus’s choices were excellent. He let the music speak for itself and didn√ɬ¢√¢‚Äö¬¨√¢‚Äû¬¢t let his ego or pretensions get in the way of telling the story.
“I can’t help but think that a more auteur-type (Martin Scorsese and Spike Lee were both attached at one time) would be more inclined to put a personal spin on the material, and thus dilute the essence of Larson’s music. The ego-less direction from Columbis lets the source material to shine through.
Rosario Dawson, Adam Pascal in Rent
“Like many others, I find myself caught in a daily grind of trying to move forth and survive in life’s scramble. Rent reminded me of how important prioritization is. When Rosario Dawson sings to Adam Pascal about how ‘life is yours to miss’ …damn, it hit hard.
“Rent reminded me of why I love art and the way it can help affirm why we’re all here.
“I think many critics are down on this thing due to an anti-Columbus bias (which I previously shared), or they just didn’t enjoy the style, music, etc. They’re missing the boat. This film is much better than Chicago and has an emotional immediacy that is heartfelt and pure.
“So three cheers for Rent and your standing-by-what-you-saw review. It’s another reason why I will remain a loyal reader of your column.” — Kyle Fredette
Brokebackers
“In the Twin Cities where I live, the Brokeback Mountain trailer has been getting lots of snickers at cineplexes and Landmark chain theaters alike. I’m no homo- phobe, and I’m a big Ang Lee fan who will be seeing Brokeback the weekend it opens here. But the collective reaction in some of these theaters has been really something.
“People openly laugh at Heath Ledger’s line ‘Why can’t I quit you?’ A very liberal friend of mine has even taken to doing his own impression of Ledger saying that line, to the howls of all of our other friends.
“While Ledger is very talented and deserves more respect than he gets, I think the idea of the star of A Knight’s Tale uttering that line is hitting people as utterly ridiculous. The line is going to be the thing that most people think of when they think of this movie. Watch over the coming months as it becomes a catchphrase.
“I’m looking forward to this movie and I’m sure it will be deserving of/in contention for numerous awards. But I expect it’s going to get quite a beating from the mass culture, in the way The Crying Game did. I hope I can find a showing in a theater on opening weekend that isn’t ruined by laughter.” — Brian Roche
“I am a 20-something woman, and James Shamus is right, as he usually is about these things, that women like me are the target audience for Brokeback Mountain, and I will be there as soon as it opens here in DC.
“But whenever I bring up BBM to any heterosexual male under 30 I just get the ‘independent films are all about gay cowboys eating pudding’ thing from South Park. These men are well-educated and enjoy independent film. And I don’t think there is so much of a cringe factor as one might think for these young-ish men watching two dudes in love. I just do not think that is the problem.
“As much as I love South Park (and personally think that their characterization of independent film is quite funny), I have to blame Matt and Trey for the chortle and giggle factor that I have run into. However, I also think that if these men got their asses into the seats and watched the film I think most of them would enjoy it. But please, take me with a huge grain of salt as I really liked Ang Lee’s The Hulk.” — Haley Aurora
“Okay, message received: Jeffrey Wells is full-steam behind Brokeback Mountain as the film of the year. Groovy. And your worries about a bubba backlash against it, spurred by homophobia, are entirely realistic and well-founded.
“But with respect, is it possible you’re overlooking the other side of the coin here?
“What I mean is, if one is going to be upfront about the fact that there will be people who will skip this movie, dump on this movie, refuse to like or admit liking this movie because of what side they take in the moral debate over gay rights…is it not only fair but simply intellectually honest to also concede that there will be people who will reflexively praise and exalt it, without having seen it because they take the opposite side and want to see a gay-themed movie succeed?
“I’m not accusing you of outright bias. You’ve seen the film, it’s obviously gotten to you in a profound way, and you’re convinced of it’s innate quality. But if it’s going to be fair-game (and I believe it ought to be) to read between the lines of negative reviews and question whether an element of homophobia is clouding the reviewer’s decision, would you not agree that it’s equally fair-game to do the same for the positive reviews?
“Not every critic is going to agree that this is a great or even good film. But how many of them will be, you’ll pardon the expression, bending over backwards to be positive about it for fear of appearing in cahoots with the religious right wackjobs who will probably be trashing it?
“I’m from Massachusetts and am regularly in the social company of various gay, bisexual or otherwise pals. I’ve supported just about every gay rights cause that’s come down the pike. I’m a full-bore enemy of religious fundamentalism in all it’s forms. I want to see a serious gay-themed movie make a mainstream impact to help society grow up a bit over the whole issue…
“And thus far, I think this movie looks like a chore. I’m sorry, but thats the impression I have right now. It’s possible my impressions are wrong, but for trailer-one this has looked to me like a drippy, soap-opera-ish, Titanic/Gone With The Wind/Cold Mountain chick-flick melodrama, and I’m regarding the prospect of seeing it with the same basic feeling you’ve expressed over sitting through the future Harry Potter sequels.
“But when I tell people this at least half of them look back at me in shock, as though I just implied that AIDS was a plague from God or that the Holocaust hadn’t occured. And I’m not seeing this discussed anywhere in the critical press, so far. Instead, the prevailing theme is Brokeback Mountain will be great, and anyone who doesn’t think so is a Christian right homophobe. And frankly, that’s just plain uncool.” — MST Mario
Wells to MST Mario: You contemptible closet-Christian bigot homophobe skeptical Ang Lee-dissing prick!
“Seriously, MST, I hear you and you’ve made some good points, but trust me on these two points: Brokeback Mountain in no way resembles Titanic or Gone With the Wind or anything along those lines. It’s austere, under-stated, and doesn’t try to massage you into feeling anything. Secondly and more importantly, it’s not a gay or gay-themed film. It really isn’t, despite what you may be presuming.
“I program a series of fine-film cinema locations here in Melbourne Australia, and last weekend I held the first public screening of Broekback Mountain in Australia as part of a promotional weekend launching a loyalty card. I attended the screening with my partner after having watched the film at an exhibitor’s screening the week prior.
“I enjoyed the film greatly at the exhib’s screening, perhaps only finding it a little longer than it could have been, but that’s probably my exhibitor’s hat talking. It actually wasn’t until I was driving home that evening that the weight of the film dawned on me and I was left profoundly moved by it. All night I wanted to talk about the film but forbid myself, not wanting to set expectations too high for my partner.
“I agree that the film is certainly worthy of a Best Pic nomination as well as a win, but from where I am standing the U.S. is a very conservative place at the moment and I wonder about the film’s box-office performance there and whether it will get the support it will need from the expanse between the east and west coasts.
“Perhaps the old adage that any publicity is good publicity” stands in this case. Who knows? Maybe if Oprah likes it, it’s in with a chance with the women of middle America.
“What I want to ltell you was that when I was at the screening, I found myself surprised by the reaction it received from the audience. Admittedly the cinema is in a very upscale location in the suburbs of Melbourne and the audience was partially made up of film buffs who jumped on the opportunity to see the film 2 months out from local release.
“But there was not a peep from anyone during the film’s more intimate scenes, 80% of the audience sat in their seats during the closing credits and when the film ended I overhead nothing other than quiet comments along the lines of ‘amazing,’ ‘brilliant,’ ‘incredible’ and other assorted superlatives. There were also plenty of tears and gasps during the film’s more shocking moments.
“It’s this reception that has me thinking that regardless of the U.S. reception, the film should find considerable success internationally.” — Kristian Connelly, Film Programmer, Cinema Europa, Traditional & Gold Class Village Cinemas, Australia
“I can understand why you’re on the Brokeback horse, but you better be paying real attention to those snickers in those heartland theaters.
“America is homphobic. To its core. And this is a film — no matter what you feel — about two guys in love. About two guys who have (rather explicit) sex with each other. And no matter how sensitive or how well-made, Brokeback mountain ain’t gonna fly in flyover country.
“And please dump your prejudices and realize that Pride and Prejudice is the kind of lush, middle-brow based-on-a-classic picture that Hollywood just loves to gift with Oscar noms.” — Lewis Beale
Man From Decency
Every now and then you need to take a break from all the Hollywood crap, and I got a really nice one last Saturday from an encounter with former U.S. Senator George McGovern. In so doing I felt an emotion that I haven’t had much contact with lately. I felt a kind of familial love.
The occasion was an early-Saturday-evening showing at Laemmle’s Music Hall of Stephen Vittoria’s One Bright Shining Moment: The Forgotten Summer of George McGovern, which I’ve been trying to catch since last July or so, when I happened to see a poster for it in the lobby of Manhattan’s Quad Cinema.
Stephen Vittoria, director of One Brief Shining Moment, and George McGovern in lobby of Laemmle’s Music Hall — Saturday, 11.19, 8:23 pm.
I’ve always admired McGovern, the longtime South Dakota liberal who’s mainly known for his catastrophic run as the Democratic President candidate in 1972 against President Richard Nixon. Hurt by a campaign that was chaotically mana- ged but also unlucky, McGovern got less than 40% of the vote and took only two states, Massachucetts and the District of Columbia.
I’ve long respected McGovern for having thetorically guided the last plain-spoken, genuinely liberal Democratic Presidential campaign. But my affection has mainly been about a long-held feeling that profound currents of decency and compassion run within him.
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It sure felt that way as he spoke to a middle-aged crowd that had just seen Vittoria’s film around 7:30 pm, and later as he posed for photos and signed autographs and whatnot in front of the theatre on Wilshire Blvd.
He’s 83 now and seems to be in excellent health — tanned, trim — and he told the crowd he wants to live to be at least 100. He needs that much time, he said, to accomplish all his goals, which include doing what he can to eliminate hunger in third-world countries.
He’s been the World Food Program’s first global ambassador on hunger since ’01, and before that served as U.S. ambassador to the U.N. Food and Agriculture Agencies, based in Rome, Italy, from ’98 to ’01.
He said that his favorite line in Vittoria’s doc is when Gloria Steinem says that looking back on the ’72 campaign, the McGovern loyalists have a lot more to be proud of than do the supporters of Nixon’s campaign, who have all that Water- gate-related skullduggery to contend with.
Salon‘s Andrew O’Heir recently wrote than “when the long lens of history finally focuses on McGovern’s contentious era, he’ll appear in the main text, named as a prophet, while Nixon will be a twisted king consigned to the footnotes.”
But when asked last Saturday evening what he thinks about the present White House occupant, McGovern said he’d rather have Nixon there.
Nixon, he pointed out, was fairly practical and forward-thinking on domestic issues and the economy. He created the Environmental Protection Agency, advocated gun control, imposed wage and price controls, etc. And he wasn’t indebted to the neocons and their absolutist agendas.
The talking heads in One Bright Shining Moment include McGovern, Steinem, Gore Vidal, Warren Beatty, Howard Zinn, Dick Gregory, Gary Hart, Frank Mankiewicz, Jim Bouton, Rev. Malcolm Boyd and Ron Kovic.
Vittoria’s film is, for my money, a little too admiring, strident and one-sided. I wish he’d talked to some conservatives and maybe even a former enemy or two. It would have given the film some added intrigue without compromising McGovern’s image.
Some liberals still flinch at the memory of the ’72 campaign, but when a man has lasted as long as McGovern has and consistently stood for caring and compassion in public afairs, what’s not to admire? We’re speaking of one of the most steadily principled men to succeed in big-time politics in the 20th Century.
McGovern and admirers on sidewalk in front of Laemmle’s Music Hall on Wilshire near Doheny — Saturday, 11.19, 8:25 pm.
The Village Voice‘s Michael Atkinson has complained that Vittoria’s doc is filled with “exactly the sort of starry-eyed, bullet-spraying hyperbole that drains credibility from any brand of political discourse,” adding that it “may be useful as home-front history, if only it didn’t rant, yowl, and wet its pants so much.”
Still, it’s a good thing to have a film out there that doesn’t just train your attention on who George McGovern really is and was, and what his campaign was all about, but which pays the proper respect.
One Bright Shining Moment: The Forgotten Summer of George McGovern has been moving from city to city since its New York debut on 9.16. It doesn’t appear to have played a lot of the big liberal cities — San Francisco, Portland, Seattle, Chicago, etc.
The distributor, First Run features, is obviously operating on a shoe-string, but you’d think they’d at least manage to get it booked in the above-named cities and get it seem by as many devoted lefties as possible before the DVD debut in April ’06.
USC Interlude
Ain’t It Cool’s Drew McWeeny and yours truly paid a visit Monday night to Charles Fleming’s “Entertainment, Business and Media in Today’s Society” class at the USC School of Journalism. We talked about internet journalism, industry politics, survival skills, the shortcomings of Tom Rothman and what the students think about the hot new movies. Defamer’s Mark Lisanti, profiled in the current issue of Los Angeles magazine, was supposed to show but bowed out at the last minute….something about his girlfriend having told him they already had “plans” (does that sound like a crock or what?). Thanks to Fleming (pictured at left with the suit and tie) for having us down.
White Eyeballs
As everyone presumably knows, I spend a lot of my spare time thinking up new ways to rip Peter Jackson. I’m kidding, but seriously…this is not one of those articles.
This is about a significant difference between Jackson’s King Kong — the big digital simian we’ll soon be seeing on the big screen — and Merian C. Cooper and Willis O’Brien’s classic stop-motion, herky-jerky version.
When this hit me the other day I was so excited I almost had to pull over and stop the car. The odd thing is that Jackson and a couple of his model-and-visual-effects guys talk about this very issue on the making-of-King Kong doc on the just-relea- sed Warner Home Video DVD of Cooper’s 1933 film.
I’m not saying Jackson has made the right or the wrong call in the fashioning of his own Kong, but stills from King Kong (Universal, 12.14) make it clear that his version is modelled pretty closely on the shape and musculature of real gorillas.
There may be some creative interpretation but compare Jackson’s ape with the shot [see below] of a Dianne Fossey gorilla…okay? Same deal. Grayish brown coat, big long Popeye arms, stubby hind legs, brown eyes.
Cooper’s Kong didn’t look like any gorilla, chimp or orangutan that had ever walked the earth. He was something between a prehistoric hybrid and an imaginary mon- ster of the id…a raging nightmare beast designed to scare the bejeesus out of 1933 moviegoers.
O’Brien, the legendary stop-motion phtography pioneer, used three slightly different-looking Kong models during filming, but for me the master stroke was deciding to give his Kong a set of gleaming white teeth and a pair of very bright white eyes.
In some of the darker shots of Kong in the 1933 film those teeth and those eyes just pop right out, and the effect is still primal as hell. Those white eyes and black pupils look so fierce and almost demonic…contrasting as they do with that black bear fur that Kong was covered in…that they almost give you the willies, even now.
Judging solely by the stills, there’s no such aura with Jackson’s National Geogra- phic Kong. The realism element is awesome but the guy doesn’t look all that spooky. I mean, not even a little bit. Ferocious and all, but he makes me think of Michael Apted and Sigourney Weaver.
There’s anothing wrong with this approach. It is what it is, and Jackson is going for his own thing. The stills and the trailer clearly suggest that his Kong is going to be one of the richest visual banquets in monster-movie history, if not movie history itself.
But in going for anthropological realism Jackson has thrown out that creepy, better-than-reality, only-in-the-movies element that gives the 1933 film a little- boy’s-nightmare quality.
Step On It
Rob Marshall’s Memoirs of a Geisha (Columbia, 12.9) is this year’s model of the big bland Best Picture contender that everyone who isn’t a sucker for this kind of thing — expensive, beautifully produced, Oscar-hungry, terminally boring — needs to throw tomatoes at.
Seriously…let’s start the ball rolling now. IM your friends and coworkers and tell them you’ve heard it’s a tedious costume-movie drag, but also that it’s caught a certain headwind and there’s a slight chance it could metastasize into this year’s Chicago.
Ziyi Zhang during her big geisha-in-a-snowfall performance number that has zip to do with her character but a lot to do with Rob Marshall’s creative sensibility
The best thing about it is Gong Li’s performance as a jealous-bitch geisha in a Bette Davis mode. Otherwise the film is all costumes and pretty photography and a rags-to-riches story that creeps along at a petty pace.
It’s porcelain, nothing, stupefying…and every Godforsaken line of Chinese-accent English-language dialogue is like screeching chalk.
The first Academy-member Geisha screening happens tonight (11.21) so no pulse- readings until tomorrow, but there’s a poll of nine connected journos that just went up today on Movie City News called “Gurus of Gold,” and Geisha is being project- ed as one the top five Best Picture contenders.
Two of the respondents — Variety guy and Maxim critic Pete Hammond and USA Today‘s Scott Bowles — are actually projecting it as the most likely Best Picture winner…at this juncture.
The stars of Memoirs of A Geisha are Ziyi Zhang, Michelle Yeoh and Gong Li… three famed Chinese actresses played Japanese geishas and speaking English …and the feeling of Hollywood fakery and retrograde attitudes is fairly relentless.
The same Anglos-first mentality that led to the casting of Marlon Brando as Sakini in The Teahouse of the August Moon (’56) and Ricardo Montalban as Nakamura in Sayonara (’57) has prevailed once again.
And at no point does Memoirs of a Geisha feel like anything more than a colorful but perfunctory corporate tour of an exotic culture, tailor-made for Disney World Americans who won’t pay to see movies with subtitles.
I can tolerate the three Chinese actresses playing Japanese (although Ziyi doesn’t look Japanese for a second, and there’s a clear genetic difference in the faces of the two peoples), but the language and accent barriers are impossible.
Marshall should have shot a Japanese-language version concurrently, which Columbia could have concurrently released into select big-city theatres. Difficult but not impossible, and then people like me would have had an easier time of it.
There’s a scene early on in which a pair of young sisters are about to be forcibly separated. A very traumatic thing, but if this were to happen in real life the sisters would be in such shock they’d probably whimper a little bit and spend most of their last few seconds just staring at each other. Not in Rob Marshall’s world. When Geisha‘s sisters are torn apart the more spirited of the two goes, “Noooooo!!”
That’s a bullshit Hollywood reaction. People in bad Hollywood movies always go “noooo!!” when something bad happens. In a way, the whole movie is like this one scene. I didn’t believe a word of it.
And I wonder if the women for whom it’s been made will either. And I doubt if any real critical support will manifest. A publicist friend tells me all the journos he’s spoken are saying “pretty to look at, but cold.”
Robin Swicord and Doug Wright’s script is based on Arthur Golden’s 1997 novel, which is a huge international best-seller. I think it’s safe to say that the movie will dampen interest in anyone who hasn’t yet read it wanting to do so. My God, who would want to take this journey twice?
Ziyi Zhang, Ken Watanebe
Set in Japan in the 1930s and ’40s, Geisha is essentially a Cinderella story, and there’s not a hint of story tension or rooting interest in any part of it.
A little Japanese girl (Suzuka Ohgo) who will eventually be called Sayuri is sold to a geisha house (called an “okiya”), kicked around and treated like a slave. She’s quite pretty as an adolescent and is considered a special standout because of a pair of very weird-looking blue eyes (which throw you completely out of the film because they look like dopey contact lenses, pure and simple).
And then she grows up to be Ziyi Zhang, who doesn’t resemble Ohgo in the slightest.
This much-celebrated 26 year-old actress gives her first nothing performance here. She brought a fierce glaring passion and a taut physicality to her roles in Crouch- ing Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Hero and found a sense of emotional truth in Wong Kar Wai’s 2046, but here she’s a piece of wood.
Gong Li wields a much sharper blade as Sayuri’s wicked geisha nemesis Hatsu- momo. She’s stuck in the same mediocre Rob Marshall movie, but there’s fire in her veins and the heat burns through, and right away she has you thinking impure thoughts.
Sayuri, in any event, is trained to be a geisha and soon gets into an ongoing generational cat-fight with the older Hatsumomo. Her ally is Yeoh’s Mameha, a 40ish geisha playing a stock older-mentor character, dispensing sage advice with the usual kindly-patient smile.
Suzuka Ohgo (l.), Gong Li
Eventually Sayuri meets Prince Charming in the form of a businessman called “The Chairman” (Ken Watanabe) and falls for him. The usual hurdles and compli- cations have to be overcome before Watanebe finally recognizes what a treasure she is and tells her he loves her.
I think I was a little happier than Sayuri was when this happened.
The most irritating performance is given by Kaori Memoi, who plays the crusty and conniving Mother, the head of Sayuri’s geisha house. Her English is so bad and so grating I literally twitched in my seat at one point.
The movie stays with the explanation in Golden’s novel about what being a geisha is all about, which is that geishas are in no way prostitutes and are more about being a very refined form of arm candy…a poised and disciplined ideal of Japanese femininity.
And yet somehow, despite all the talk about no sexual favors, Sayuri and Mameha end up doing some nocturnal skinny-dipping with a bunch of Japanese business- men and an American colonel (Ted Levine) in the third act.
A Japanese businessman admirer of Sayuri has asked her to cuddle up to the American Colonel so he get get a business deal out of him, and when Levine’s character makes a move a few minutes later Sayuri is shocked and offended.
This is ridiculous, and another reason I didn’t believe what the film was selling. Geishas are not hookers, okay, but all my life I’ve been told that carnal knowledge is sometimes part of the equation. You just have to be the right guy with the right attitude, the good manners of a gentleman and a lot of money.
No one will argue with Geisha getting the usual below-the-line nominations that are always handed to a film of this type. Dion Beebe’s cinematography, John Myhre’s production design, Colleen Atwood’s costumes and John Williams’ score are all topnotch. What the hell, throw in nominations for the editor and the sound editing guys.
Geisha was mostly shot in the Los Angeles area (an outdoor Japanese village was built north of the city), including the Sony soundstages in Culver City. That means a lot of local people were paid top dollar, which tends to produce in the minds of Academy people an urge to reciprocate in the form of handing out Oscar nomina- tions in the less-important categories.
But classy window-dressings aren’t enough to justify nominating a film for Best Pic- ture. The above-the-line nutrition in Memoirs of a Geisha simply isn’t there, and no amount of cheerleading by its supporters is going to change that fact.
Step On It
Rob Marshall’s Memoirs of a Geisha (Columbia, 12.9) is this year’s model of the big bland Best Picture contender that everyone who isn’t a sucker for this kind of thing — expensive, beautifully produced, Oscar-hungry, terminally boring — needs to throw tomatoes at.
Seriously…let’s start the ball rolling now. IM your friends and coworkers and tell them you’ve heard it’s a tedious costume-movie drag, but also that it’s caught a certain headwind and there’s a slight chance it could metastasize into this year’s Chicago.
Ziyi Zhang during her big geisha-in-a-snowfall performance number that has zip to do with her character but a lot to do with Rob Marshall’s creative sensibility
The best thing about it is Gong Li’s performance as a jealous-bitch geisha in a Bette Davis mode. Otherwise the film is all costumes and pretty photography and a rags-to-riches story that creeps along at a petty pace.
It’s porcelain, nothing, stupefying…and every Godforsaken line of Chinese-accent English-language dialogue is like screeching chalk.
The first Academy-member Geisha screening happens tonight (11.21) so no pulse- readings until tomorrow, but there’s a poll of eleven connected journos that just went up today on Movie City News called “Gurus of Gold,” and Geisha is being project- ed as one the top five Best Picture contenders.
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Two of the respondents — Variety guy and Maxim critic Pete Hammond and USA Today‘s Scott Bowles — are actually projecting it as the most likely Best Picture winner…at this juncture.
The stars of Memoirs of A Geisha are Ziyi Zhang, Michelle Yeoh and Gong Li… three famed Chinese actresses played Japanese geishas and speaking English …and the feeling of Hollywood fakery and retrograde attitudes is fairly relentless.
The same Anglos-first mentality that led to the casting of Marlon Brando as Sakini in The Teahouse of the August Moon (’56) and Ricardo Montalban as Nakamura in Sayonara (’57) has prevailed once again.
And at no point does Memoirs of a Geisha feel like anything more than a colorful but perfunctory corporate tour of an exotic culture, tailor-made for Disney World Americans who won’t pay to see movies with subtitles.
I can tolerate the three Chinese actresses playing Japanese (although Ziyi doesn’t look Japanese for a second, and there’s a clear genetic difference in the faces of the two peoples), but the language and accent barriers are impossible.
Marshall should have shot a Japanese-language version concurrently, which Columbia could have concurrently released into select big-city theatres. Difficult but not impossible, and then people like me would have had an easier time of it.
There’s a scene early on in which a pair of young sisters are about to be forcibly separated. A very traumatic thing, but if this were to happen in real life the sisters would be in such shock they’d probably whimper a little bit and spend most of their last few seconds just staring at each other. Not in Rob Marshall’s world. When Geisha‘s sisters are torn apart the more spirited of the two goes, “Noooooo!!”
That’s a bullshit Hollywood reaction. People in bad Hollywood movies always go “noooo!!” when something bad happens. In a way, the whole movie is like this one scene. I didn’t believe a word of it.
And I wonder if the women for whom it’s been made will either. And I doubt if any real critical support will manifest. A publicist friend tells me all the journos he’s spoken are saying “pretty to look at, but cold.”
Robin Swicord and Doug Wright’s script is based on Arthur Golden’s 1997 novel, which is a huge international best-seller. I think it’s safe to say that the movie will dampen interest in anyone who hasn’t yet read it wanting to do so. My God, who would want to take this journey twice?
Ziyi Zhang, Ken Watanebe
Set in Japan in the 1930s and ’40s, Geisha is essentially a Cinderella story, and there’s not a hint of story tension or rooting interest in any part of it.
A little Japanese girl (Suzuka Ohgo) who will eventually be called Sayuri is sold to a geisha house (called an “okiya”), kicked around and treated like a slave. She’s quite pretty as an adolescent and is considered a special standout because of a pair of very weird-looking blue eyes (which throw you completely out of the film because they look like dopey contact lenses, pure and simple).
And then she grows up to be Ziyi Zhang, who doesn’t resemble Ohgo in the slightest.
This much-celebrated 26 year-old actress gives her first nothing performance here. She brought a fierce glaring passion and a taut physicality to her roles in Crouch- ing Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Hero and found a sense of emotional truth in Wong Kar Wai’s 2046, but here she’s a piece of wood.
Gong Li wields a much sharper blade as Sayuri’s wicked geisha nemesis Hatsu- momo. She’s stuck in the same mediocre Rob Marshall movie, but there’s fire in her veins and the heat burns through, and right away she has you thinking impure thoughts.
Sayuri, in any event, is trained to be a geisha and soon gets into an ongoing generational cat-fight with the older Hatsumomo. Her ally is Yeoh’s Mameha, a 40ish geisha playing a stock older-mentor character, dispensing sage advice with the usual kindly-patient smile.
Suzuka Ohgo (l.), Gong Li
Eventually Sayuri meets Prince Charming in the form of a businessman called “The Chairman” (Ken Watanabe) and falls for him. The usual hurdles and compli- cations have to be overcome before Watanebe finally recognizes what a treasure she is and tells her he loves her.
I think I was a little happier than Sayuri was when this happened.
The most irritating performance is given by Kaori Memoi, who plays the crusty and conniving Mother, the head of Sayuri’s geisha house. Her English is so bad and so grating I literally twitched in my seat at one point.
The movie stays with the explanation in Golden’s novel about what being a geisha is all about, which is that geishas are in no way prostitutes and are more about being a very refined form of arm candy…a poised and disciplined ideal of Japanese femininity.
And yet somehow, despite all the talk about no sexual favors, Sayuri and Mameha end up doing some nocturnal skinny-dipping with a bunch of Japanese business- men and an American colonel (Ted Levine) in the third act.
A Japanese businessman admirer of Sayuri has asked her to cuddle up to the American Colonel so he get get a business deal out of him, and when Levine’s character makes a move a few minutes later Sayuri is shocked and offended.
This is ridiculous, and another reason I didn’t believe what the film was selling. Geishas are not hookers, okay, but all my life I’ve been told that carnal knowledge is sometimes part of the equation. You just have to be the right guy with the right attitude, the good manners of a gentleman and a lot of money.
No one will argue with Geisha getting the usual below-the-line nominations that are always handed to a film of this type. Dion Beebe’s cinematography, John Myhre’s production design, Colleen Atwood’s costumes and John Williams’ score are all topnotch. What the hell, throw in nominations for the editor and the sound editing guys.
Geisha was mostly shot in the Los Angeles area (an outdoor Japanese village was built north of the city), including the Sony soundstages in Culver City. That means a lot of local people were paid top dollar, which tends to produce in the minds of Academy people an urge to reciprocate in the form of handing out Oscar nomina- tions in the less-important categories.
But classy window-dressings aren’t enough to justify nominating a film for Best Pic- ture. The above-the-line nutrition in Memoirs of a Geisha simply isn’t there, and no amount of cheerleading by its supporters is going to change that fact.
USC Interlude
Ain’t It Cool’s Drew McWeeny and yours truly paid a visit Monday night to Charles Fleming’s “Entertainment, Business and Media in Today’s Society” class at the USC School of Journalism. We talked about internet journalism, industry politics, survival skills, the shortcomings of Tom Rothman and what the students thought about the hot new movies. Defamer’s Mark Lisanti, profiled in the current issue of Los Angeles magazine, was supposed to show but bowed out at the last minute….something about his girlfriend having told him they already had “plans” (does that sound like a crock of shit or what?). Thanks to Fleming (pictured at left with the suit and tie) for having us down.
Doug Pratt of DVDlaser.com says we should all check out a five-minute video piece by director Sydney Pollack on the new DVD of The Interpreter that explains the importance of letterboxing. “His plea for getting braindead viewers to understand why letterboxing is better is exceptionally well composed and engaging — essentially the best piece ever done on the topic in a DVD supplement,” writes Pratt. “Pollack talks about how he made films in a scope format initially, and then switched to the boxier, TV-friendly format when he saw what happened to his wide films on TV. He then explains why he chose to return to widescreen for The Interpreter, and demonstrates what the viewer is missing when the presentation is cropped. It is a calm and rational explanation, but his passion is communicated with an equal clarity, and the segment ought to be playing in a continuous loop in the video department of every Wal-Mart and Target in the country.”
Girl Power
It was early Wednesday afternoon, and I was standing in the hallway of the 26th floor of Toronto’s Four Season’s hotel, waiting for my ten-minute quickie with In Her Shoes director Curtis Hanson.
And then a door opened about three feet away and Shoes costar Shirley Maclaine, who owns each and every scene she appears in, peeked out and said hello.
A Fox publicist sitting to MacLaine’s left smiled and nonchalantly said “hey.” I forget how Maclaine replied, but I think she was mainly looking to take a breather.
In Her Shoes star Toni Collette, snapped at Wednesday night’s post-gala party, has shed the weight she gained for the film and is now quite obviously not a brunette, as she is in the film. Director Curtis Hanson, Shirley MacLaine, Cameron Diaz and a bunch of journos (Peter Rainer among them), publicists and agents were also huddling in the VIP area.
The Fox publicist smiled and said, “Shirley, this is Jeffrey Wells, a journalist, and he really likes the film.”
“A man who likes the film….good,” said MacLaine.
The publicist turned slightly in my direction and said, “Tell Shirley what you told me.”
I looked at MacLaine and said, “I think it’s the best chick flick to come along since Terms of Endearment.”
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And I know how phony that sounds. People are always tossing around suck-uppy comments at press junkets, but I really haven’t responded this strongly to a film that’s mainly about older and younger women in the same family grappling with heavy emotional life issues since that 1983 James L. Brooks film.
Really…I haven’t. And if I have I can’t think what other film I might be forgetting about.
“That’s good but it’s not a chick flick,” Maclaine said right away. “It’s really about family. Nice meeting you…bye.” And then she closed the door.
“She’s a bit of a character,” the publicist said. I was thinking to myself, didn’t MacLaine just make a point about a man liking this thing?
In Her Shoes director Curtis Hanson during my ten-minute interview with him at Toronto’s Four Seasons hotel — Wednesday, 9.14, 1:12 pm.
Trust me — In Her Shoes is a chick flick. It just happens to be a very good one, and when a particular type of movie is really exceptional that usually means it’s digging deeper and operating with more skill and finesse than other chick flicks that have gone before. And that means it has become more of a plain old good movie than just a chick flick…even though it started out that way.
It was finally time for my ten-minute Curtis Hanson interview. I’ll get into this sometime over the next two or three days, but Curtis was his usual robust and articulate self and I wished we could’ve had…oh, maybe two or three minutes more? Should I shoot the moon and wish for an extra five?
When I was told I would only have ten minutes with Hanson, I coughed and shifted my weight and leaned forward and said, “Ten minutes?” It felt insulting at first glance. Why not eight minutes? Why not two? The haiku interview!
I wrote a blurb-sized review of In Her Shoes yesterday for the Wired box. I’ll try and write more this weekend…maybe.
Line Walker
Walk The Line holds up and then some. I liked and respected it after seeing it the first time (i.e., last July), but didn’t quite love it. I saw it again Tuesday morning and while I’m still not 100% wowed by the love story element, I have an even greater respect for how lean and down-to-it and well-assembled this film is.
I’ll say it again for the sake of emphasis: this movie, very neatly, is analogous to a Johnny Cash song — solid and straight, no b.s. or flaky embroidery. And it’s very conceivable it could punch through as a Best Picture nominee because of these attributes alone.
Walk the Line director and co-writer James Mangold (l.) with star Joaquin Phoenix at 20th Century Fox’s post-screening party for Walk the Line — Tuesday, 9.13, 10:10 pm.
Oh, and that item I ran about director James Mangold having allegedly trimmed a bit out of the opening scenes of Walk the Line so it would lessen resemblances to Ray? Bogus. Mangold is telling journalists that the film has been locked for the last four months, and the version I saw this morning in Toronto was precisely the same one I saw in Manhattan, so sorry for briefly muddying the waters.
After seeing four movies today — Walk the Line, the very authentic and unsettling Paradise Now, John & Jane (see review below) and Larry Clark’s lazy, totally masturbatory Wassup Rockers — I strolled over to the Walk the Line party at the Chanel store on the north side of Bloor between Bay and Avenue Road.
The small VIP room was upstairs and very poorly ventilated. No sooner did the Fox publicists wave me into this inner sanctum when Joaquin Phoenix and a friend of his both lit up cigarettes, and you could really smell it.
Daily Mail columnist Baz Bamigboye and I spoke with Phoenix for a few minutes. He’s a nice guy, cool dude. I loved hearing that he hasn’t seen Walk the Line yet, either in a screening room or with an audience, and he has no plans to see it in the foreseeable future. He laughed when he said this, and his laugh has a very slight tone of perversity.
Jane Seymor and husband James Keach, producer and ground-floor instigator of Walk the Line at same after-party — Tuesday, 9.13, 9:55 pm.
I complimented Phoenix on his ultra-realistic fight scene with Mark Wahlberg in The Yards, which is one of the all-time greats. I was surprised to hear that he and Wahlberg didn’t have a stunt guy advising them, but worked out the rollin’ and tumblin’ on their own. They wore knee pads and just told each other, “Okay, I’m gonna hit you and you’re gonna fall down the stairs and then…”, etc.
Mangold, dressed in a tweed jacket and just as warm as I was, was friendly and gracious. I asked him about the film’s best scene, which he wrote, in which Sun records owner Sam Phillips tells Cash and his band during an audition that he doesn’t believe Cash’s signing of a gospel tune, and that he needs to sing some- thing tough and real, etc. Mangold agreed it’s one of the film’s best, and he toasted actor Dallas Roberts, who plays Phillips, for making the scene play as well as it does.
I also spoke to producer James Keach, who knew Cash for several years and tried, with Cash’s approval, to launch his own Cash biopic for a long while before he tied in to the Fox/Mangold/Phoenix project.
Keach and I talked about Cash’s first wife, Vivian, and how the way she’s written and the actress who plays her, Ginnifer Goodwin, makes her seem like the world’s biggest complainer and worst marital partner…a total drag.
What did they get married for? I asked Mangold. Was it sex or…? Mangold said Cash once told him he got married to Vivian because he considered her a dead ringer for Pier Angeli, who was (allegedly) the great love of James Dean’s life.
Curried Hell
For three days I’ve been looking for a new film that would provoke a really strong reaction (the last was Sydney Pollack’s Sketches of Frank Gehry, which I saw on Saturday) and it finally happened this afternoon when I saw Ashim Ahluwalia’s John & Jane.
It’s basically about those Bombay or New Delhi guys we talk to all the time for tech support and who sometimes cold-call to try and sell us worthless crap…those repulsively polite Indian humanoids who’ve brought so much irritation and frustration and pure sputtering rage into our lives…ah, yes.
Image from Ashim Ahluwalia’s John & Jane
I don’t hate John and Jane, but I can’t say I enjoyed watching it.
I may have felt a tiny bit oppressed by the elitist buzz that decreed early on (as ascertained in a Peter Howell piece than ran a week ago last Saturday) this was a must-see. But I could see right off it’s a worthy, decently made thing as well as humanistic statement of sorts — half-compassionate, half-ironical.
Ashluwalia is clearly trying to lend a sad human face and some kind of darkly ironic perspective to the economic scourge that is Indian outsourcing.
But I loathe and despise those Indian phone-center workers, mainly because 90% of them are morons when it comes to any kind of serious technical challenges regarding PDA’s or computer hardware or e-mail issues.
They tie you up with their ninny-nanny questions and they waste your time and sometimes come close to destroying entire work days, and if I could clap my hands and eliminate all instances of Americans like me ever again speaking with Indian tech support guys between now and the end of time, I would clap my hands.
You sit and watch John & Jane and you say, “Okay, here they are in the flesh…those relentlessly considerate and persistent boobs I’ve been speaking with from time to time over the last few years…and it turns out they might be more miserable than myself.
“They feel economically fucked over by the companies they work for,
and some want better lives and some have the discipline and focus to perhaps raise themselves to the next level…but they all seem to lead spiritually depleted (or at least wanting) lives, and a couple of them seem so brainwashed by the lure of the American materialistic dream that it’s making me slightly ill.
“And…what am I supposed to take from this? I still despise these guys. I still hate that I’ve wasted so many hours of my life talking to them. So what exactly am I getting from this movie other than a reminder that we’re all fucked one way or the other?”
Just before seeing John & Jane I caught a noon screening of Hany Abu-Assad’s Paradise Now, the Warner Independent release (Nov. 11) about a couple of Middle Eastern childhood friends recruited to become suicide bombers against a target in Tel Aviv.
After seeing both I realized I’d like to see a hybrid that blends the two. It would be about two American lonely guys who so hate Indian phone centers that they’ve gone a little bit wacko. They assemble a Fight Club-like team of 12 or 15 guys to fly over to India to become suicide bombers — martyrs for the cause of wiping out as many Indian phone-bank centers as they can.
What sustains them, of course, is a belief that Americans back home will privately think of them as heroes. I don’t know that I’d feel quite that way myself if this were to actually happen, but I must say my reactions would probably be mixed.
Fresh Grabs
Brokeback Mountain director Ang Lee at beginning of interview at Toronto’s Park Hyatt — Monday, 9.12, 11:35 am.
Pick Up The Mic director Alex Hinton (r.) and Cuba Gooding at a party for Hinton’s film, known in festival circles as an explosive documentary on the world of queer hip-hop, on the penthouse floor of the Manulife building — Sunday, 9.11, 11:50 pm. Producer Steve Nemeth (a good guy) was there, and Jeff “the Dude” Dowd and Mickey Cottrell invited me, and the view…
…of the Toronto nightscape was awesome — Sunday, 9.11, 11:35 pm.
Charlotte Rampling, easily the most alluring and delectable woman I have gazed upon so far at the Toronto Film Festival (and that covers a lot of hotties). In town to promote Laurent Cantet’s Heading South (Vers le Sud), in which she costars, Rampling was sitting at a party thrown on Monday, 9.12, by Catherine Verret and the French Film Office. The location was Prego, at 150 Bloor Street.
Jeff Stanzler, the very sharp and engaging director-writer of Sorry Haters, at IFC pizza party at Prego thrown from 5 to 7 pm on Monday, 9.12. Haters‘s next festival showing is on Friday evening, 9.16, at the Cumberland.
A post-screening discussion of Abel Ferrara’s Mary at Isabel Bader theatre on Sunday evening. Ferrara sat on the edge of the stage and let go with his usual raspy-voiced moody-genius colorful-downtown-guy number as he answered questions. Costar Matthew Modine stood directly behind Ferrara. Standing next to Modine was the film’s editor, Langdon Page.
The War Within director and co-writer Jeff Castelo, about a young Pakistani guy whose plan to blow himself up as part of an attack on New York City is re-examined at the 11th hour. Castelo grew up in Mountainside, New Jersey, which is walking distance from my hometown of Westfield, N.J. Pic was taken at HDNet/Magnolia Films breakfast at Toronto’s Windsor Arms hotel — Monday, 9.12, 8:40 am. (Notice the partially shadowed features of Bubble director Steven Soderbergh, sitting behind Castelo and to his left.)
During the q & a that followed Monday evening’s public screening of Liev Schrieber’s Everything is Illuminated, a broadly played road movie about a young Jewish American lad (Elijah Wood) visiting the Ukraine to commune with his family’s roots and history. That’s director-writer Schreiber standing at left in front of the mike, with Wood and costar Eugene Lutz to the right.
Karen Young (l.) and Louise Portal, costars with Charlotte Rampling in Laurent Cantet’s Heading South, at Monday’s French Film Office party at Prego — 9.12, 12:45 pm
I realize I just ran a shot of the Elgin theatre prior to a screening last weekend, but here’s another one…taken just before Monday afternoon’s showing of Michael Haneke’s Cache (a.k. a., Hidden) — 9.12, 2:55 pm
Master Builder
Sydney Pollack’s Sketches of Frank Gehry, which I caught yesterday at a public screening at the historic Elgin theatre, is a stirring, hugely likable portrait of the most daring and innovative architect of our time.
As corny as this sounds, Sketches left me with a more vivid feeling of celebration and with more reasons to feel enthused and excited about life than anything I’ve seen so far at this festival.
Director Sydney Pollack, architect Frank Gehry at Saturday afternoon’s cocktail party for Sketches of Frank Gehry in downtown Toronto — 9.10, 6:25 pm.
I knew a few things about Gehry before seeing this film, but not a whole lot. Now I feel like I know a few things. The man is the Pablo Picasso of architects. He’s a risk-taker who lives big and tosses the creative dice all the time and really goes for it. And I now know about his significant creations (the most famous being Disney Hall in downtown Los Angeles and a seaside museum in Bilbao, Spain), how he creates, who he mostly is, where he’s been.
Sketches is more than just a meet-and-understand-Frank-Gehry movie — it’s a contact high.
It’s a film that lets you into the head of a genius in a very relaxed and plain-spoken way, and it lets you share in the sense of being a person of Gehry’s magnitude — a guy who has created a kingdom out of a supreme confidence in his dreams, but at the same time someone honest enough to admit he doesn’t precisely know what he’s doing much of the time.
This is partly due to Gehry having been very open and unguarded with Pollack as the doc was being shot, and partly due to Pollack having sculpted this film in a way that feels more personal and congenial and relaxed than your typical portrait- of-a-noteworthy-person movie.
And yet Pollack doesn’t relent in passing along all the information we need to know about Gehry. It’s all done with total thoroughness and clarity of purpose.
Gehry’s Guggenheim museum in Bilbao, Spain.
I met and spoke with Gehry and Pollack at a nice cocktail party on Wellington Street late yesterday afternoon, courtesy of publicist Amanda Lundberg. What a pleasure to hang with these guys. I left the party feeling wise and steady and optimistic about everything.
Sketches of Frank Gehry will air on the PBS “American Masters” series in late ’06, but Pollack first wants it to play theatrically. This should happen. I can see this film being an essential “see” with people of a certain stripe, and yet a ten year-old kid could watch it and understand almost everything.
I can only repeat that the film is much more than just a sturdy documentary — it’s a profound turn-on. I’ve looked at Gehry’s buildings and designs — those weirdly bent and sloping pieces of steel and sheet metal and glass and what-have-you — but I never really “saw” them until yesterday.
There’s a wonderful edit right at the beginning of the film, which I won’t spoil by describing in too much detail. Suffice that it takes Gehry’s doodly drawings and brings them into full-metal aliveness in a single stroke.
There’s another delicious moment when Julian Schnabel is asked about Gehry’s press critics, and he refers to them as “flies on the neck of a lion…they’re the sort of people who complain that Robert Duvall’s character in Apocalypse Now is over the top.”
Terry Gilliam, Jodelle Ferland during shooting of Tideland
Just before the Gehry party I saw Terry Gilliam’s Tideland, which everyone I’d spoken to had warned me away from. (One guy told me it’s the worst film of the festival so far; another called it “unreleasable.”) This is why I wanted to see it, frankly. I like seeing films that everyone has trashed because I always seem to find something about them that I like or admire.
But not this time. Tideland feels Gilliam-esque (visually alluring and semi-pastoral at times with a Fisher King-like fetish for dust and grunge and curio clutter) but it was very tough going, for the most part. I’m talking about zero tension, funereal pacing, no engagement in the characters to the point of engendering hostility, a maddening sense of directorial indulgence, etc.
“It is [Gilliam’s] willingness to push his material to the extreme edge that makes him a true original,” says Toronto Film Festival director Piers Handling in the program notes. This signature has also resulted in two critically dumped-on movies in a row (this and The Brothers Grimm.)
Tideland is basically about the fantasy life of a little girl named Jeliza-Rose (Jodelle Ferland), a sire of junkie parents (Jeff Bridges, Jennifer Tilly) who both dead of overdoses, leaving the kid to imagine voices, play with tiny doll heads she wears on the tips of her fingers and explore her imaginings to her heart’s content.
She eventually becomes friends with a moron named Dickens (Brendan Fletcher) and his witch-like sister Dell (Janet McTeer), and now we have three wackos living in their dreams and acting weird for weird’s sake, or for Gilliam’s sake…whatever.
During shooting of Tideland.
I really can’t do this, I told myself. I can’t sit through another Terry Gilliam stylistic free-for-all masturbation movie. Others had the same notion. Two guys in front left somewhere around the 45 minute mark. Then another one left, and then another. I’ve seen this domino effect before. People say to themselves, “If all these guys are leaving, this gives me an excuse to leave too.”
I turned to Chicago Tribune critic Mark Caro, who was sitting to my immediate left, but he was toughing it out. I said to myself, “If Caro goes, I go….and I won’t feel as guilty about walking out on a Terry Gilliam movie.” Another guy left. A woman left. Caro was looking around and chuckling at the exodus, but he wouldn’t budge. So I decided to be a man and just do it on my own.
I next went to a warm, family-friendly dinner party thrown by Sony Classics. It was attended by the Capote crew (director Bennett Miller, actors Phillip Seymour Hoffman, Clifton Collins, Jr., and Catherine Keener, screenwriter Dan Futterman), Breakfast on Pluto director Neil Jordan and star Cillian Murphy, Why We Fight director Eugene Jarecki, and The Devil and Daniel Johnston director Jeff Feuerzig, along with the usual pack of journo-critic freeloaders.
Feuerzig was nice about my having thrown water on his film a couple of days ago. He asked me to see the entire film some day, and I promised I would.
What I actually said in my piece was that I don’t care for Johnson’s music, and without that affinity I couldn’t muster any interest in his emotional and psychological troubles. (Whereas I could when it came to Brian Wilson’s story in I Just Wasn’t Made For These Times because I love Wilson’s music.)
Capote star Phillip Seymour Hoffman (l) and the film’s director Bennett Miller at Sony Classics party at Margaret’s Brasserie — Saturday, 9.10, 7:35 pm.
It felt briefly odd to hear Hoffman speak in his own voice, which is sort of deepish and a tiny bit guttural, rather than his mincing Truman Capote voice, which everyone loves. The crowd at the public screening at the Elgin was obviously eating it up. There was strong laughter here and there. The “Bergdorf’s” line got a big response.
After the Sony thing ended I went to the Brokeback Mountain party and said howdy to Heath Ledger, Terry Gilliam (I didn’t bring up Tideland), producer James Schamus, film journalist Paul Cullum, New York Times reporter Sharon Waxman, the Focus Features publicity team and I forget who else.
Smash-up
It’s a two-bit irony, but there’s no denying it: the professional failure that Orlando Bloom’s character goes through in the opening of Elizabethtown, which is massive and absolute, is not unlike the sense of almost total failure that seems to be enveloping the film and its director-writer Cameron Crowe right now, at the Toronto Film Festival.
Crowe is going to be trimming Elizabethtown down by several minutes, perhaps as much as 15 or 20, but there are so many things in this undisciplined movie that have seemed to so many people at this festival to be terribly wrong, that it seems damn near unfixable.
It could work for some people in the ticket-buying world, but this movie is for all practical purposes finished with the critics and journos who’ve been nothing but supportive of Crowe’s films in the past.
Elizabethtown director-writer Cameron Crowe.
A day and a half has passed since I saw Elizabethtown at Friday evening’s press screening, and I’m still shattered by the half-failure of it. So bummed and turned around, in fact, that I couldn’t summon the courage to attend the Elizabethtown press conference that happened about an hour ago. (It’s now about 12:20 pm.) I thought it would hurt too much to listen to what I was sure would be a display of forced gaiety.
Yeah, half-failure. This is a movie that stabs itself in the chest over and over during the first hour or so, but then it finds itself somewhere near the halfway point and becomes…well, not a movie exactly but a meditation about what it is in life that is joyful and soul-restoring, and which generally keeps us going.
Elizabethtown starts out on a note of futility and plans of bloody suicide, with Orlando Bloom ready to pack it in after a winged running shoe he’s designed has resulted in a loss of nearly a billion dollars.
Then he’s saved, in a way, by news of the death of his father. He forgets about “the plan” and flies to Kentucky to take care of the funeral arrangements. And on the way he meets a plane stewardess (Kirsten Dunst) who’s so oppressively perky and Jean Arthur-ish that…I’m getting ahead of myself and not completing my thought.
Which is this: if you forget about Elizabethtown not working as a real movie — minus most of the disciplines, character shadings and payoffs we’ve seen in Crowe’s previous films — if you forget all that stuff and just go with the meditative flow, it starts to work after the first hour or so.
Orlando Bloom
You can’t really believe in it — the movie is way too un-tethered — but you can sorta roll with it and feel the vibe. I did, at least.
I was not having a miserable time at the end, and some (but not all) of the middle is pretty good. The problem, for me, is in the first hour, and I don’t know where to start, or even if I want to.
It’s not just that the crash-and-burn opening (Bloom saying “I’m okay” over and over, his girlfriend leaving him because he’s failed, every last person in the office eyeballing him) is too Jerry Maguire-ish. It feels completely artificial every step of the way, and keeps hitting you with stuff you can’t help but disbelieve or gag on.
I can’t catalogue everything that falls apart in this section, but for openers Crowe doesn’t tell us why the running shoe has died, or why the company didn’t do any product testing, or why Alec Baldwin, the big boss, would sink $900 million-plus into launching a single line…I didn’t believe a second of it.
When something awful has happened to you, people who know you don’t usually look directly at you. Certainly not in a group situation. They usually avoid eye contact because they don’t want to deal with your pain, because they’re afraid it might be catching.
The suicide stabbing device that Bloom nearly uses on himself seems ridiculous. With all the suicide options out there, who in the world would think of stabbing themselves to death with a big knife tied to a workout contraption?
Kirsten Dunst
There has never been a flight from Seattle to Kentucky in the history of aviation with only one passenger on the plane.
There’s an argument with an Elizabethtown local about what color suit his deceased father should wear — they want brown, Bloom insists on blue. And then there’s a shot of the body in the coffin and Bloom’s father is wearing a suit of…dark gray!
When Orlando Bloom’s character finds out that his father has died and he flies off to the bluegrass state, there’s no real reason for his mom (Susan Sarandon) and sister to not come with him.
Sarandon, we are told, starts taking dance lessons right when she learns of her ex-husband’s death, and a mere four days later she’s found a teacher, had a lesson or two and learned enough to cautiously perform a tap-dance routine in front of the Kentucky family…pretty fast work!
I was in shock. I was in denial. I couldn’t accept that this movie was misfiring as badly as it was. But then, finally, the fog lifted. It’s not that Elizabethtown started being good but that it stopped making me groan, and the movie’s basic theme — what makes us stay in love with life? — started to find its feet.
Dunst, Bloom on Elizabethtown set
Someone has written that “those magical moments that survive in memory from the weakest of Crowe’s works are simply nowhere to be found.” No — the last third is actually pretty good, or at least there’s a way to roll and groove with it. That is, if you follow my instructions.
It starts sometime after the all-night cell phone conversation scene (Bloom and Dunst never recharge their phones, and why should they?), and then it starts to grow and build. I actually liked the final road-trip sequence, which a lot of people have told me they couldn’t stand.
Bloom isn’t great in the role, but he’s not bad. The relentlessly positive perkiness coming out of Dunst starts to wear you down after a while. Bruce McGill, Alec Baldwin and Susan Sarandon are…okay. But nobody kills.
About 70 minutes into the film, a certain high-profile movie guy whom everyone knows got up and left the theatre. (He came back later, he says.) As he left to go out through the right-side tunnel, he very briefly turned and looked at the audience as if to say, “I’m a little bit surprised there are so many you continuing to sit there and watch this thing.”
About ten minutes later two major critics sitting a row in front of me got up and left. I’ve walked out on plenty of films but almost never one directed by a name-brand guy like Crowe. Wait a minute…I just walked out on a Terry Gilliam film yesterday. And I admit to being so miserable watching Martin Scorsese’s Kundun that I shut my eyes and fell asleep. But I was still shocked when I saw those two guys get up and bolt.
I wish there was some way for me to believe this movie isn’t dead, dead…deader than dead. But I really think it is.
The next chapter in the Elizabethtown saga will be upon us when an F.X. Feeney-like savior comes along and says, “No, no…you guys missed it! This movie is brilliant. It’s just that Crowe decided to take a big leap over the usual narrative devices and you guys were too constipated or conservative-minded to get what he was doing!”
I am not that guy, but I say again: forget about Elizabethtown doing what you’d like it to do (i.e., delivering the goods the way Billy Wilder used to) and just wait for the here-are-the-things- that-make-life-worth-living portions, which mostly unfold in the second half.
Master Builder
Sydney Pollack’s Sketches of Frank Gehry , which I caught yesterday at a public screening at the historic Elgin theatre, is a stirring, hugely likable portrait of the most daring and innovative architect of our time.
As corny as this sounds, Sketches left me with a more vivid feeling of celebration and with more reasons to feel enthused and excited about life than anything I’ve seen so far at this festival.
Director Sydney Pollack, architect Frank Gehry at Saturday afternoon’s cocktail party for Sketches of Frank Gehry in downtown Toronto — 9.10, 6:25 pm.
I knew a few things about Gehry before seeing this film, but not a whole lot. Now I feel like I know a few things. The man is the Pablo Picasso of architects. He’s a risk-taker who lives big and tosses the creative dice all the time and really goes for it. And I now know about his significant creations (the most famous being Disney Hall in downtown Los Angeles and a seaside museum in Bilbao, Spain), how he creates, who he mostly is, where he’s been.
Sketches is more than just a meet-and-understand-Frank-Gehry movie — it’s a contact high.
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It’s a film that lets you into the head of a genius in a very relaxed and plain-spoken way, and it lets you share in the sense of being a person of Gehry’s magnitude — a guy who has created a kingdom out of a supreme confidence in his dreams, but at the same time someone honest enough to admit he doesn’t precisely know what he’s doing much of the time.
This is partly due to Gehry having been very open and unguarded with Pollack as the doc was being shot, and partly due to Pollack having sculpted this film in a way that feels more personal and congenial and relaxed than your typical portrait- of-a-noteworthy-person movie.
And yet Pollack doesn’t relent in passing along all the information we need to know about Gehry. It’s all done with total thoroughness and clarity of purpose.
Gehry’s Guggenheim museum in Bilbao, Spain.
I met and spoke with Gehry and Pollack at a nice cocktail party on Wellington Street late yesterday afternoon, courtesy of publicist Amanda Lundberg. What a pleasure to hang with these guys. I left the party feeling wise and steady and optimistic about everything.
Sketches of Frank Gehry will air on the PBS “American Masters” series in late ’06, but Pollack first wants it to play theatrically. This should happen. I can see this film being an essential “see” with people of a certain stripe, and yet a ten year-old kid could watch it and understand almost everything.
I can only repeat that the film is much more than just a sturdy documentary — it’s a profound turn-on. I’ve looked at Gehry’s buildings and designs — those weirdly bent and sloping pieces of steel and sheet metal and glass and what-have-you — but I never really “saw” them until yesterday.
There’s a wonderful edit right at the beginning of the film, which I won’t spoil by describing in too much detail. Suffice that it takes Gehry’s doodly drawings and brings them into full-metal aliveness in a single stroke.
There’s another delicious moment when Julian Schnabel is asked about Gehry’s press critics, and he refers to them as “flies on the neck of a lion…they’re the sort of people who complain that Robert Duvall’s character in Apocalypse Now is over the top.”
Terry Gilliam, Jodelle Ferland during shooting of Tideland
Just before the Gehry party I saw Terry Gilliam’s Tideland, which everyone I’d spoken to had warned me away from. (One guy told me it’s the worst film of the festival so far; another called it “unreleasable.”) This is why I wanted to see it, frankly. I like seeing films that everyone has trashed because I always seem to find something about them that I like or admire.
But not this time. Tideland feels Gilliam-esque (visually alluring and semi-pastoral at times with a Fisher King-like fetish for dust and grunge and curio clutter) but it was very tough going, for the most part. I’m talking about zero tension, funereal pacing, no engagement in the characters to the point of engendering hostility, a maddening sense of directorial indulgence, etc.
“It is [Gilliam’s] willingness to push his material to the extreme edge that makes him a true original,” says Toronto Film Festival director Piers Handling in the program notes. This signature has also resulted in two critically dumped-on movies in a row (this and The Brothers Grimm.)
Tideland is basically about the fantasy life of a little girl named Jeliza-Rose (Jodelle Ferland), a sire of junkie parents (Jeff Bridges, Jennifer Tilly) who both dead of overdoses, leaving the kid to imagine voices, play with tiny doll heads she wears on the tips of her fingers and explore her imaginings to her heart’s content.
She eventually becomes friends with a moron named Dickens (Brendan Fletcher) and his witch-like sister Dell (Janet McTeer), and now we have three wackos living in their dreams and acting weird for weird’s sake, or for Gillam’s sake…whatever.
During shooting of Tideland.
I really can’t do this, I told myself. I can’t sit through another Terry Gilliam stylistic free-for-all masturbation movie. Others had the same notion. Two guys in front left somewhere around the 45 minute mark. Then another one left, and then another. I’ve seen this domino effect before. People say to themselves, “If all these guys are leaving, this gives me an excuse to leave too.”
I turned to Chicago Tribune critic Mark Caro, who was sitting to my immediate left, but he was toughing it out. I said to myself, “If Caro goes, I go….and I won’t feel as guilty about walking out on a Terry Gilliam movie.” Another guy left. A woman left. Caro was looking around and chuckling at the exodus, but he wouldn’t budge. So I decided to be a man and just do it on my own.
I next went to a warm, family-friendly dinner party thrown by Sony Classics. It was attended by the Capote crew (director Bennett Miller, actors Phillip Seymour Hoffman, Clifton Collins, Jr., and Catherine Keener, screenwriter Dan Futterman), Breakfast on Pluto director Neil Jordan and star Cillian Murphy, Why We Fight director Eugene Jarecki, and The Devil and Daniel Johnston director Jeff Feuerzig, along with the usual pack of journo-critic freeloaders.
Feuerzig was nice about my having thrown water on his film a couple of days ago. He asked me to see the entire film some day, and I promised I would.
What I actually said in my piece was that I don’t care for Johnson’s music, and without that affinity I couldn’t muster any interest in his emotional and psycholo- gical troubles. (Whereas I could when it came to Brian Wilson’s story in I Just Wasn’t Made For These Times because I love Wilson’s music.)
Capote star Phillip Seymour Hoffman (l) and the film’s director Bennett Miller at Sony Classics party at Margaret’s Brasserie — Saturday, 9.10, 7:35 pm.
It felt briefly odd to hear Hoffman speak in his own voice, which is sort of deepish and a tiny bit guttural, rather than his mincing Truman Capote voice, which everyone loves. The crowd at the public screening at the Elgin was obviously eating it up. There was strong laughter here and there. The “Bergdorf’s” line got a big response.
After the Sony thing ended I went to the Brokeback Mountain party and said howdy to Heath Ledger, Terry Gilliam (I didn’t bring up Tideland), producer James Schamus, film journalist Paul Cullum, New York Times reporter Sharon Waxman, the Focus Features publicity team and I forget who else.
Smash-up
It’s a two-bit irony, but there’s no denying it: the professional failure that Orlando Bloom’s character goes through in the opening of Elizabethtown, which is massive and absolute, is not unlike the sense of almost total failure that seems to be enveloping the film and its director-writer Cameron Crowe right now, at the Toronto Film Festival.
Crowe is going to be trimming Elizabethtown down by several minutes, perhaps as much as 15 or 20, but there are so many things in this undisciplined movie that have seemed to so many people at this festival to be terribly wrong, that it seems damn near unfixable.
It could work for some people in the ticket-buying world, but this movie is for all practical purposes finished with the critics and journos who’ve been nothing but supportive of Crowe’s films in the past.
Elizabethtown director-writer Cameron Crowe.
A day and a half has passed since I saw Elizabethtown at Friday evening’s press screening, and I’m still shattered by the half-failure of it. So bummed and turned around, in fact, that I couldn’t summon the courage to attend the Elizabethtown press conference that happened about an hour ago. (It’s now about 12:20 pm.) I thought it would hurt too much to listen to what I was sure would be a display of forced gaeity.
Yeah, half-failure. This is a movie that stabs itself in the chest over and over during the first hour or so, but then it finds itself somewhere near the halfway point and becomes…well, not a movie exactly but a meditation about what it is in life that is joyful and soul-restoring, and which generally keeps us going.
Elizabethtown starts out on a note of futility and plans of bloody suicide, with Orlando Bloom ready to pack it in after a winged running shoe he’s designed has resulted in a loss of nearly a billion dollars.
Then he’s saved, in a way, by news of the death of his father. He forgets about “the plan” and flies to Kentucky to take care of the funeral arrangements. And on the way he meets a plane stewardess (Kirsten Dunst) who’s so oppressively perky and Jean Arthur-ish that…I’m getting ahead of myself and not completing my thought.
Which is this: if you forget about Elizabethtown not working as a real movie — minus most of the disciplines, character shadings and payoffs we’ve seen in Crowe’s previous films — if you forget all that stuff and just go with the meditative flow, it starts to work after the first hour or so.
Orlando Bloom
You can’t really believe in it — the movie is way too un-tethered — but you can sorta roll with it and feel the vibe. I did, at least.
I was not having a miserable time at the end, and some (but not all) of the middle is pretty good. The problem, for me, is in the first hour, and I don’t know where to start, or even if I want to.
It’s not just that the crash-and-burn opening (Bloom saying “I’m okay” over and over, his girlfriend leaving him because he’s failed, every last person in the office eyeballing him) is too Jerry Maguire-ish. It feels completely artificial every step of the way, and keeps hitting you with stuff you can’t help but disbelieve or gag on.
I can’t catalogue everything that falls apart in this section, but for openers Crowe doesn’t tell us why the running shoe has died, or why the company didn’t do any product testing, or why Alec Baldwin, the big boss, would sink $900 million-plus into launching a single line…I didn’t believe a second of it.
When something awful has happened to you, people who know you don’t usually look directly at you. Certainly not in a group situation. They usually avoid eye contact because they don’t want to deal with your pain, because they’re afraid it might be catching.
The suicide stabbing device that Bloom nearly uses on himself seems ridiculous. With all the suicide options out there, who in the world would think of stabbing themselves to death with a big knife tied to a workout contraption?
Kirsten Dunst
There has never been a flight from Seattle to Kentucky in the history of aviation with only one passenger on the plane.
There’s an argument with an Elizabethtown local about what color suit his deceased father should wear — they want brown, Bloom insists on blue. And then there’s a shot of the body in the coffin and Bloom’s father is wearing a suit of…dark gray!
When Orlando Bloom’s character finds out that his father has died and he flies off to the bluegrass state, there’s no real reason for his mom (Susan Sarandon) and sister to not come with him.
Sarandon, we are told, starts taking dance lessons right when she learns of her ex-husband’s death, and a mere four days later she’s found a teacher, had a lesson or two and learned enough to cautiously perform a tap-dance routine in front of the Kentucky family…pretty fast work!
I was in shock. I was in denial. I couldn’t accept that this movie was misfiring as badly as it was. But then, finally, the fog lifted. It’s not that Elizabethtown started being good but that it stopped making me groan, and the movie’s basic theme — what makes us stay in love with life? — started to find its feet.
Dunst, Bloom on Elizabethtown set
Someone has written that “those magical moments that survive in memory from the weakest of Crowe’s works are simply nowhere to be found.” No — the last third is actually pretty good, or at least there’s a way to roll and groove with it. That is, if you follow my instructions.
It starts sometime after the all-night cell phone conversation scene (Bloom and Dunst never recharge their phones, and why should they?), and then it starts to grow and build. I actually liked the final road-trip sequence, which a lot of people have told me they couldn’t stand.
Bloom isn’t great in the role, but he’s not bad. The relentlessly positive perkiness coming out of Dunst starts to wear you down after a while. Bruce McGill, Alec Baldwin and Susan Sarandon are…okay. But nobody kills.
About 70 minutes into the film, a certain high-profile movie guy whom everyone knows got up and left the theatre. (He came back later, he says.) As he left to go out through the right-side tunnel, he very briefly turned and looked at the audience as if to say, “I’m a little bit surprised there are so many you continuing to sit there and watch this thing.”
About ten minutes later two major critics sitting a row in front of me got up and left. I’ve walked out on plenty of films but almost never one directed by a name-brand guy like Crowe. Wait a minute…I just walked out on a Terry Gilliam film yesterday. And I admit to being so miserable watching Martin Scorsese’s Kundun that I shut my eyes and fell asleep. But I was still shocked when I saw those two guys get up and bolt.
I wish there was some way for me to believe this movie isn’t dead, dead…deader than dead. But I really think it is.
The next chapter in the Elizabethtown saga will be upon us when an F.X. Feeney-like savior comes along and says, “No, no…you guys missed it! This movie is brilliant. It’s just that Crowe decided to take a big leap over the usual narrative devices and you guys were too constipated or conservative-minded to get what he was doing!”
I am not that guy, but I say again: forget about Elizabethtown doing what you’d like it to do (i.e., delivering the goods the way Billy Wilder used to) and just wait for the here-are-the-things- that-make-life-worth-living portions, which mostly unfold in the second half.
Grabs
Poster on Yonge Street just south of Bloor.
Brokeback Mountain cast (Heath Ledger, Jake Gyllenhaal, Michelle Williams, Anne Hathaway) prior to Saturday afternoon’s press conference — 9.10, 2:38 pm.
Mrs. Henderson Presents director Stephen Frears, producer-star Bob Hoskins at beginning of press conference at Sutton Place hotel — Friday, 9.9, 12:30 pm.
Frank Gehry at Saturday’s post-Elgin-screening party for Sydney Pollack’s Sketches of Frank Gehry
Snapped at Sony Classics party — the sock-wearer was very obliging.
Capote screenwriter Dan Futterman, costar Cliffton Collins, Jr. at Sony Classics party — 9.10, 8:25 pm.
Breakfast on Pluto director Neil Jordan, star Cillian Murphy at Saturday evening’s Sony Classics party.
Sony Classics co-chief Tom Bernard, Capote director Bennett Miller
Elgin theatre, a bit prior to showing of Sketches of Frank Gehry — Saturday, 9.10, 11:55 am
Hurtin’
Friday was a very emotional and in some ways startling day at the Toronto Film Festival, in some ways pleasant and other ways not so.
The biggest heartbreaker and shocker was finally seeing Cameron Crowe’s Elizabethtown. I wish I had the time to get into it this morning but I don’t. I’ll try and tap something out later this afternoon.
I had a lot of reactions to this film that I need to sort through, and while some (half?) are positive or on the positive side…and it really breaks my heart to say this because I regard Cameron as a hugely talented guy and a first-rate hermano, and because I read the Elizabethtown script a year or so ago and was quite touched by it…but dammit, there are also more than a few negatives.
Heath Ledger, Jake Gyllenhaal in Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain. (I’m getting a little tired of running this image over and over — I wish I could find some other decent two-shot of these guys.)
I have to also report that the reaction of the critics and journos I spoke to after last night’s screening was, sorry to say, extremely negative. I’m talking walkouts, people washing their hands, shaking their heads, etc. It was shattering for me personally, and I can’t imagine how things must feel from Crowe’s side of the fence.
It was announced before last night’s screening that Crowe is doing a re-edit of the film, and that the final version will be signficantly different than the one everyone was about to see…making it clear that Crowe and Paramount are reeling from the reaction that resulted from the Venice Film Festival showings.
I have to leave for an Ang Lee-James Schamus interview in about 25 minutes, so let’s move on to a less anguished confession, which is that Friday’s penultimate high, far and away, was seeing Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain.
I’d been hearing from friends who saw it at Telluride that it’s an immensely moving film about love denied, but even with this advance preparation I was a bit surprised.
Brokeback Mountain is a tremendously sad film in the finest way imaginable. It’s not a downer but a profound and very touching tragedy, between which there is a very marked difference.
I will no longer feel comfortable calling this (as everyone else has for the last several months) a “gay cowboy” film because it’s good and profound enough creation that calling it that (a fair if blunt description) is like calling Lawrence of Arabia the story of a gay sadomasochistic British adventurer in white robes on a camel.
I’m saying that the carefully rendered heart of this film, along with the artistic conviction and craftsmanship that have combined to push the essence of it through, are much stronger than the nominal subject matter.
Brokeback Mountain is Ang Lee’s most emotionally moving film ever. It is certainly going to be on almost everyone’s ten-best list, and it may well be nominated for Best Picture by the Academy. It is that good, that strong.
I never thought I’d say this because I don’t tend to like (i.e., respond to with comfort or true openness of feeling) gay-guy love stories, but I felt this one…it got through and I let it in.
And apart from the guiding hand of Ang Lee, this happened to a large extent because of Heath Ledger’s tortured inhabiting of Ennis del Mar, the more repressed and tragic of the two lead characters.
Jake Gyllenhaal gives everything he has to the role of Jack Twist, and he nails it as well as anyone could, but Ennis suppresses his feelings more forcefully and fearfully (it’s not just his words that sound like they’re sitting somewhere deep in his stomach and afraid to come out), and his life is therefore much more screwed up than Jack’s as a result, and so he gets you all the more.
Ledger gives the performance of his life in this film. He will win awards, he will get great reviews…his career has been pretty much saved by this film.
And he will almost certainly be nominated for…I don’t know what category they’re going to put him in but they should push for Best Supporting Actor. Who knows if he’ll win or not, but he makes this character and the burden he carries into a searing and poignant thing.
Jammed
I saw three films start-to-finish on the opening day of the Toronto Film Festival, which was yesterday (i.e., Thursday the 8th): Imagine Me and You, Shopgirl, L’Enfer. And their respective grades are a B, a C-minus and an A-minus.
I also toughed my way through about 60% of the wildly overpraised The Devil and Daniel Johnston until I reached the point of sufficient saturation.
Early evening crowd prowling Cumberland Road, a big party street one block north of Bloor — Thursday, 9.8, 7:35 pm.
I also saw out of mild curiosity the last 20 or 25 minutes of The President’s Last Bang, a Korean-made drama about maneuvers surrounding the assassination of President Park Chung-hee.
I’m going to try and set things straight about Johnston a few graphs from now, but first…
Imagine, which Fox Searchlight picked up last week, is a commercially-angled, British-made lesbian love story made for straights and squares. It deals in subtle turns and sometimes bittersweet humor, and it avoids the farcical and steers clear of clichés (for the most part) until the final act.
Is it a great or exceptional film? No, but it’s not half bad for what it is. It’s probably the most accessible and sympathetically-constructed movie about a girl falling for a girl I’ve ever seen. I felt comfortable with the emotionality…I let it in.
Matthew Goode, Piper Parabo in Imagine Me and You
It didn’t make me fume or seethe in my seat, and for someone who had very little use for Four Weddings and a Funeral and wanted to club Love Actually over the head with a tire iron, that’s saying something.
It stars Piper Parabo (Coyote Ugly), Lena Headey (the female lead in Terry Gilliam’s The Brothers Grimm) and Matthew Goode, and the story is basically about Rachel (Perabo) discovering not long after marrying Heck (Goode), a financial trader of some sort, that she’s flipped for Luce (Heady), who runs a London flower shop.
Parts of it are good enough that I was reminded, vaguely, of another London-based story about a person involved in both a gay and hetero romance at the same time — John Schlesinger’s Sunday Bloody Sunday.
Ol Parker, the director-writer of Imagine Me and You, obviously had no interest in rising to the level of this 1971 film, but he exhibits an aptitude for similar delicacies and emotional finessings from time to time.
There’s too much happiness in the finale, and the producers should have dropped the idea of using the Turtles’ “Happy Together” (the `60s pop song that contains the line, “Imagine me and you..I do…I think about you every night…it’s only right…” etc.)
Claire Danes, Steve Martin in Shopgirl
The big-city critics are probably going to tear Imagine apart, but you can’t trust big-city critics when it comes to films like this….you have to open your pores and listen to your small intestines. I don’t know why I just wrote that.
Shopgirl is said to be based on Steve Martin’s dry, somewhat downbeat novella of the same name. It’s not, actually.
Someone at Disney said, “We can’t really do Steve’s book…we have to settle for taking the basic story line and then broadening it out and adding extra moods and colors and beefing up the Jason Schwartzman character so we can get the kids to come see it.”
And then the director, Anand Tucker, decided to add syrupy violin music and splashes of artsy-fartsy digital photography here and there, and the end result is simultaneously too much and not enough. It seems overly fussed with, as if portions of it were re-shot and re-edited. A lot of it feels awkwardly stitched together and tonally lumpy.
If everyone had said, “Let’s make a little movie that’s really based on Steve’s book for next to nothing and worry about pocketing the big paychecks on the next job,” it might have worked…maybe.
It’s basically the story of Mirabelle (Claire Danes), a would-be artist who’s slowly dying of boredom selling gloves at the Beverly Hills branch of Saks Fifth Avenue (i.e., the one in which Winona Ryder was busted for shoplifting). For what it’s worth, Danes gives the film’s best performance by far…but then she’s always good.
The movie spends 15 or 20 minutes setting up her relationship with a poor amplifier technician named Jeremy (Schwartzman) before Ray Porter (Martin) comes into the store and sweeps Mirabelle off her feet with some genteel moves that include lavishing her with nice gifts and paying off her college loan.
You know Danes isn’t going to last with Martin and will end up with Schwartzman, etc., but I wasn’t prepared for the depressing fact that Martin is looking older and puffier than I’d prefer. I don’t know if it’s cosmetic surgery or whatever, but he should try and go back to looking precisely the way he did when he made All of Me, or at least The Spanish Prisoner.
And it’s understandable that Martin’s Ray Porter doesn’t say any sharp zingy lines because he’s this slightly dull guy from Seattle, but it would have been cool regardless if he had been written as a Steve Martin-ish wise-ass.
Danis Tanovic’s No Man’s Land (’01) was a gripping, beautifully composed political film and anti-war statement that ranked alongside Paths of Glory.
Now it’s four years later and Tanovic has delivered L’Enfer (i.e., The Inferno), a dark French family melodrama about dysfunction and woundings being passed along from one generation to the next.
Danis Tanovic
It costars Emmanuelle Beart, Karin Viard, Marie Gillain, Carole Bouquet, Jacques Gamblin and Guillaume Canet.
L’Enfer is extremely well made, beautifully photographed and cut, well cast and perfectly acted. It didn’t rock my world like No Man’s Land did, but it definitely imparts an aura of profound penetration, although in a more intimate vein.
And it has a killer ending. Perhaps not quite as zinger-like as the last five minutes of Woody Allen’s Match Point, but close enough.
Everyone I spoke to after the screening said they liked it, respected it, etc. But I think deep down they were a tiny bit disappointed. I don’t quite understand why I’m having trouble coming up with more flattering things to say about a film I’ve given an A-minus to. I probably just need a few hours to let it rumble around inside.
The Devil and Daniel Johnston is a smartly-made doc about Johnston, a real-life guy famous for being a sensitive genius-level songwriter-performer who peaked in the mid `80s but couldn’t hack the rough and tumble (i.e., getting rejected by girls, etc.) and went into a psychological tailspin.
To me, the guy is/was Brian Wilson, but with one big difference: I’ve worshipped Wilson’s music for decades while Johnston’s music — dinky little woe-is-me, I-hurt-so-bad ditties sung with a whiny voice — doesn’t do a thing for me, or didn’t when I heard them during my anguished exposure to this film.
Daniel Johnston
I’m not saying Johnston’s work doesn’t deserve respect. People who know alternative music better than me think it’s great, or at least that it used to be.
I’m saying that if I’m going to sit through a doc about a guy who went down the rabbit hole adn lost his marbles, I need to be a bit invested by way of the music he made (or is still making). That’s how I got into Don Was’s Brian Wilson doc I Just Wasn’t Made For These Times, which I thoroughly loved.
For what it’s worth, director Jeff Feuerzig knows how to cut and pace and explore a tough subject in a way let’s you see right down to the core. I just didn’t care to spend more than an hour in Johnston’s company.
I’ve known a lot of brilliant nutters who might have been Mozart or Joan of Arc or Isadora Duncan if they hadn’t been mentally unstable or taken too much acid, etc. Sorry, but these stories have been done to death.
Today, 9.9
…is a day for at least five films, two press conferences and one party.
Mrs. Henderson Presents at 9 ayem, and then Tim Burton’s The Corpse Bride, Jesus is Magic, followed by press conferences for Shopgirl and Mrs. Henderson (if I can fit them in), and then screenings of Brokeback Mountain and Elizabethtown.
The party is in honor of Sarah Silverman and Jesus is Magic, starting around 9 or 10 pm.
Grabs
Cumberland Road cafe near Bellair
Ad on Bay Street, north of Bloor.
Cash It
Walk the Line (20th Century Fox, 11.18), a frank, straight-from the-shoulder biopic about the late Johnny Cash, is making a lot of moves right now. It played Telluride last week and will hit the Toronto Film Festival very soon, so I guess it’s time to jump in.
I was cool with it, felt good about it and admired it in most of the ways that usually count. For above all (and because there are many pleasures in the way it unfolds), Walk the Line is a solid, strongly composed thing — cleanly rendered and always touching the bottom of the pool.
Walk the Line costars Joaquin Phoenix (as Johnny Cash) and Reese Witherspoon (as June Carter)
Just as George Clooney’s Good Night, and Good Luck plays, appropriately, like a live 1950s TV drama, Walk the Line is constructed and delivers like a good Johnny Cash song…no b.s., down to it, aching emotions right there on the sleeve.
It’s easily Mangold’s best film ever, and from the guy who directed Girl Interrupted, the respectable Cop Land, the unsettling Identity, the nicely composed Kate & Leopold and the excellent Heavy, that’s saying something.
And you can definitely take Joaquin Phoenix and Reese Witherspoon’s performances as Cash and the apple of his eye, June Carter, to the bank. They’re both spot-on…fully believable, living and breathing on their own jazz, and doing their own singing and knocking down any resistance or concerns you might have about either one being able to inhabit or become the real deal.
Phoenix is a lock for a Best Actor nomination, and Witherspoon for a Best Actress nom — no question.
And yet the more I think back upon Walk the Line, the less certain I feel about its chances in the Best Picture competition.
Who cares, right? It is what it is, and let the Academy go twiddle their thumbs. You will not in any way feel burned by this movie, and in many ways it will leave you with a feeling of finely-honed honesty and conviction…isn’t that the bottom line?
Johnny Cash and Elvis Presley, backstage after a show they gave in ’56.
But I have to be dirt straight and say that the story of the film, which can basically be boiled down to “when will Johnny and June finally get married?”, didn’t exactly throttle me.
Walk the Line is very austere and manly, but when you look at it in sections, it’s just a standard showbiz saga progression thing…this happened, that happened, this happened, etc.
But the real reason it might run into trouble with the Academy is one that David Poland alluded to in the mid-summer but didn’t touch last week in his review out of Telluride, which is that Walk the Line is a bit too much like Ray…it’s too deja-vu.
Both films tell stories about a famous but flawed musical performer…the boy-born-into-southern-poverty thing, the rural hand-to-mouth upbringing, the sympathetic loving mother, the brother dying in childhood and marking the singer-to-be for life, an early marriage followed by drug abuse and infidelity, the cleanup detox scene, etc.
And frankly? It doesn’t get you emotionally all that much, although it does get you in retrospect because it feels honest and solid and doesn’t flit around. This movie never snickers or leers or tugs at your shirtsleeves — it says it plain, take it or leave it. And that grows on you.
The basic arc of this thing is, when will Johnny Cash attain a state of togetherness and a lack of encumbrance due to this or that gnarly issue (drug problems, marriage to first wife, etc.) to finally win over June Carter and get her to accept his marriage proposals? When will Johnny and June finally get hitched? That’s the basic shot.
It’s not meant as a put-down, but I don’t happen to feel that this or that woman (I don’t care how beautiful or giving or strong-of-spirit she is) can save any man’s life. Happiness can only be self-created — it must come from within. I understand and respect that Johnny felt differently and needed June like a rose needs rainwater, etc., but I couldn’t empathize.
But I did feel it…that’s the odd thing. I felt a sense of absolute completeness, of bare-boned reality and complexity…in no persistent way did Walk the Line make me feel under-nourished.
Make of this what you will. I obviously can’t figure it out myself, but I’ve tried to be true to the spirit of this film by just saying it and letting the chips fall.
Grabs 2
Inside Varsity cinemas, taken right after screening of L’Enfer around 7 pm.
Ditto
Vera Wang store on prince Arthur Ave. near Avenue Road — Thursday, 9.8, 8:10 pm.
Change of Season
The winding down of the ’05 summer is fortunate in two respects: it’s getting a tiny bit cooler in the city (there was a transcendent breeze travelling southward down Broadway Monday night around 9:30 pm), and it gives me something to write about during a flat week.
It felt to me like an above-average summer. At the end of each year I always come up with a list of 40 or 45 films that were good, very good or excellent, and here we had a summer providing about 21 first-raters, or just over five per month. (I’m going by the perimeters of May 1st through August 30th.) Not bad for a season that’s thought to be mainly about flotsam and popcorn and yeehaw.
Ralph Fiennes in Fernando Mierelles’ The Constant Gardener (Focus Features, 8.31)
I’ve written enough about the good ones in past columns, so I’m going to have more to say about the problems and irritants. But starting at the top…
GOOD AS IT GOT (in the following order): Hustle & Flow, The Constant Gardener, Cinderella Man, Last Days, Crash, The Beautiful Country, Grizzly Man, Wedding Crashers, Batman Begins, Mad Hot Ballroom, The Beat That My Heart Skipped, The Aristocrats, Broken Flowers, Kingdom of Heaven, The White Diamond, Layer Cake, Cronicas, My Summer of Love, This Divided State, Tell Them Who You Are, War of the Worlds.
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That was the good news, although I’m presuming very few even had the option of seeing The White Diamond, a Werner Herzog doc I wrote about in the June 8 column, or Mark Wexler’s Tell Them Who You Are, a feisty portrait of the director’s relationship with his overbearing dad, the award-winning cinematographer Haskell Wexler.
The lesser films were tedious, grueling or worse. I am one who feels especially dispirited by cheesily commercial films made by directors and writers whom I know are capable of delivering much smarter and craftier stuff, and…well, I guess I should leave Judd Apatow and The 40 Year-Old Virgin alone. (I’ve been warned by readers.)
But this isn’t an obsession thing of mine. It’s a sum-up piece and Virgin has made a big splash, but it’s really not fit to lick the boots of The Wedding Crashers and deserves to be called the SUMMER’S MOST OVER-PRAISED SO-SO COMEDY.
Russell Crowe, Renee Zellwegger in Ron Howard’s Cinderella Man
Just gonna zotz out the rest…
PUTRID, REPUGNANT, MALIGNANT…NOT TO MENTION ONE OF THE MOST BREATHTAKING CAPITULATIONS & SELL-OUTS IN HOLLYWOOD HISTORY BY A TALENTED DIRECTOR WHO KNEW BETTER: Doug Liman’s Mr. and Mrs. Smith, which way too many people gave a pass to with the rationale that it was harmless fluff.
MOST ATTENTION-GETTING WIPEOUT & ACROSS-THE-BOARD CAREER DAMAGER: The Island. The bitch-slapping of Michael Bay may not have been such a bad thing for the guy. The only way Bay is going to do better work (and I know he’s capable of it) is to be woken up from the narcotized pipe dream of being Michael Bay (muscle cars, bimbo girlfriends, parking in handicapped spaces, etc.), and it’s a safe bet that the staggering failure of The Island has made him reconsider his whole program. Producer Walter Parks got slapped around also when he said insufficient star wattage on the part of Island costar Scarlett Johansson was one of the reasons the film tanked; the take-no-guff Johansson fired right back and set him straight.
MOST LOATHSOME BIG-STUDIO RELEASES AFTER PREVIOUS TWO: The Dukes of Hazzard, Star Wars, Episode 3: Revenge of the Sith, Bewitched.
The Beat That My Heart Skipped
SEX SCENES SO BORING AND UNAPPETIZING THAT THOUSANDS OF COUPLES MIGHT HAVE BEEN PERSUADED TO PUT ASIDE SEXUAL ACTIVITY FOR A BRIEF PERIOD: Michael Winterbottom’s 9 Songs.
NOTEWORTHY ON-SCREEN IMPROV: After Kieran O’Brien playfully blindfolds Margo Stilley in 9 Songs, she says, “I can’t see!”
A MOVIE THAT PERSUADED ME TO THINK NEGATIVELY ABOUT A BIRD SPECIES THAT I’VE HAD NOTHING AGAINST MY ENTIRE LIFE: March of the Penguins. You can sing the praises of this doc all you want, but those Emperor penguins spend way too much time trudging across Antarctic wastelands and sitting on unhatched eggs during blizzards. The success of this film was mainly driven by women and old people. Tell me one regular guy you know who went to this thing on his own (or with his regular-guy friends) and came back going, “Amazing!” I don’t want to see any animals suffer, but it would have enlivened things if a few more penguins had been eaten by predators.
AS A LIVE-ACTION DIRECTOR, IT’S TIME TO FACE THE FACT THAT TIM BURTON MAY BE OVER: Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.
NOT ENOUGH: Monster-in-Law, The Untold Story of Emmett Louis Till, Bad News Bears, Dark Water, Asylum, The Chumscrubber, Lila Says , Rize.
Christian Bale in Chris Nolan’s Batman Begins
FLATLINERS: The Longest Yard, Madagascar, Kings and Queen, Lords of Dogtown, Must Love Dogs , Fantastic Four, Stealth, The Brothers Grimm, Heights.
WANTED TO SEE ‘EM, MISSED THE SCREENINGS, COULDN’T SEE FORKING OVER TEN BUCKS, ETC.: Howl’s Moving Castle, High Tension, The Devil’s Rejects, November, Mysterious Skin, Murderball, The Edukators .
WOULDN’T SEE ‘EM AT THE POINT OF A KNIFE: The Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants, The Honeymooners, Herbie: Fully Loaded .
NOT HALF BAD: Yes, Red Eye, Four Brothers, Reel Paradise, House of Wax, Dominion: Prequel to The Exorcist, The Great Raid, The Last Mogul , Me and You and Everyone We Know, George A. Romero’s Land of the Dead.
BIGGEST ACTOR BREAKTHROUGHS: Rachel McAdams (The Wedding Crashers, Red Eye), who could wind up doing it all. Terrence Howard (Hustle & Flow, Crash), who deserves a Best Actor nomination hands-down for his Memphis pimp. Vince Vaughn (Wedding Crashers…can’t wait for his tortured deejay movie for director David O. Russell). And Amy Adams (Junebug), although she needs to move beyond that sweet and trusting magnolia-blossom thing.
LEAST INTRIGUING NEW ACTOR (and a possible speed-bump for Clint Eastwood’s Flags of our Fathers): Jesse Bradford , the costar of Heights who, in that film, wore a fixed expression that said, “I’m not really getting what’s going on…I’m not sure what to say or do…maybe if I just stand here long enough looking like a stubble-faced bowling pin with legs, events will sort themselves out.”
Jesse Bradford at Sundance Film Festival, looking a lot less clueless and confused than he does in Heights…so maybe it’s not a terminal problem.
SUMMER’S BIGGEST STOCK-DROPPERS: Tom Cruise and Will Ferrell. Will Cruise ever get back the lustre he had in the wake of Jerry Maguire, or are emperors forever disempowered once the public has seen them without their aura of mystery and velvet robes? When Ferrell came out of the shadows of that bungalow to talk with Owen Wilson in that third-act scene in Wedding Crashers, you could almost hear the film’s energy collapse and an instant consensus form in the audience that he didn’t belong and was way overdoing it. Plus he was ickily unfunny in Bewitched . This sounds incredible for a guy who’s only been a marquee draw since Old School, but he may already be heading downhill.
COLD-SHOULDERED, UNDER-ATTENDED, INSUFFICIENTLY LOVED: Cinderella Man, Kingdom of Heaven, Tell Them Who You Are, My Date With Drew.
Toronto Jam
This year’s Toronto Film Festival (Sept. 8th through 17th) is a big problem in the best way imaginable: there are too many good films to see in only nine days. I gripe about this every time the schedule is announced, but this year is really a bitch.
I’ve come up with 69 films I’d like to see (or in some cases, see again). If I run around like an animal and the screening times mesh perfectly with my column-writing schedule (which never happens) and I don’t get shut out of any films (which happens a lot at this festival), I’ll be able to catch four per day or 36 films.
That means I’m going to have to forget about seeing 33 films that I’d definitely see under free-and-clear circumstances. This means I have to start crossing a lot of ’em off…a tough but necessary task.
Imagine a filmmaker having just finished a film into which he/she has invested every last drop of blood, sweat and tears, only to read some journalist talking about taking a few whiffs and calibrating the angle of the dangle and going, “Naah, I don’t think I’ll see that one.”
I’d like to hear anything from anyone out there because these lists are always changing, but at first glance here’s what’s doing. The films I’d like to see but have doubts about are italicized; keepers (i.e., films most likely to connect with paying audiences because they look commercial or will prove aesthetically exceptional) are boldfaced.
WORLD CINEMA (4): River Queen, director: Vincent Ward. (financing problems, Samantha Morton problems…a sturm und drang movie); Shooting Dogs, director: Michael Caton-Jones (always approach an MCJ film with caution); Le Temps qui reste, director: Francois Ozon (haven’t heard anything to quicken my pulse); Tsotsi, director: Gavin Hood (Athol Fugard source material…being schmoozed into seeing this by Donna Daniels and Emily Lowe.) Keeper total: 0.
Jason Statham in Guy Ritchie’s Revolver
DIALOGUES: TALKING WITH PICTURES (4): Midnight Movies: From the Margin to the Mainstream, director: Stuart Samuels (talked to Samuels in Cannes even though I hadn’t see it…love the subject but I may miss it again); My Dad Is 100 Years Old, director: Guy Maddin (maybe, but The Saddest Music in the World didn’t do it for me); Open City, director: Roberto Rossellini (never seen a decent print, I’d love to see it with a hip crowd, and I’ll probably blow it off); William Eggleston in the Real World director: Michael Almereyda (not feeling it). Keeper total: 0.
DISCOVERY (1): Stoned, director: Stephen Woolley (missed the market screenings in Cannes…I was told it wasn’t so hot…I’d like see it anyway because it’s about the death of Brian Jones). Keeper total: 0.
The White Masai
MASTERS (11): Breakfast on Pluto, director: Neil Jordan (seeing it here Friday); Brokeback Mountain, director: Ang Lee (will someone please arrange an impromptu screening of Andy Warhol and Paul Morrissey’s Lonesome Cowboys during the festival?); Bubble, director: Steven Soderbergh (for the last few years Soderbergh has been like Mickey Mantle during one of his slumps…the fans in the stands going, “Hit one out of the park, Mick!” with their fingers crossed); Cache, director: Michael Haneke (missed it in Cannes where it almost won the Palme d’Or…have to see it); L’ Enfant, directors: Jean-Pierre Dardenne, Luc Dardenne (the Palme d’Or winner at last May’s Cannes Film Festival); Free Zone, director: Amos Gitai (saw it in Cannes, wouldn’t mind catching it again… fascinating road movie that takes you through Israel and Jordan…fine Natalie Portman performance…satisfying in a minor key); Iberia, director: Carlos Saura (waiting to hear something); No Direction Home: Bob Dylan, director: Martin Scorsese (how can I miss this?…then again, one wonders what fresh new aspect of Dylan-the-sourpuss can Scorsese be expected to uncover?); Tideland , director: Terry Gilliam (there’s no missing a Gilliam); The Best of Our Times, director: Hsiao-hsien Hou (maybe); and Takeshis, Takeshi Kitano‘s latest about a celebrity confronting a double. Keeper total: 7.
Cameron Diaz in an alleged still from Curtis Hanson’s In her Shoes
MIDNIGHT MADNESS (2): The Great Yokai War, director: Takashi Miike (maybe); Sarah Silverman: Jesus is Magic, director: Liam Lynch (liked her in The Aristocrats…she played the nagging-bitch girlfriend in School of Rock). Keeper total: 0.
REAL TO REEL (6): a/k/a Tommy Chong, director: Josh Gilbert (definite interest so far); A Conversation with Basquiat, director: Tamra Davis (ditto); The Devil and Daniel Johnston, director: Jeff Feuerzig (heard good things when it played Sundance); Leonard Cohen: I’m Your Man, director: Lian Lunson (gotta catch this one); Twelve Disciples of Nelson Mandela, director: Thomas Allen Harris (definitely intrigued); and Why We Fight, director: Eugene Jarecki. Keeper total: 3.
Dame Judi Dench in Stephen Frears’ Mrs. Henderson Presents
SPECIAL PRESENTATIONS (18): Art Project: Ghosts of Woodrow, director: Graeme Patterson (waiting to hear something); Bee Season, director: Scott McGehee, David Siegel (Tom Luddy having chosen it to play Telluride Film Festival ought to mean something); Capote, director: Bennett Miller (seeing it in NYC this week); Dave Chappelle’s Block Party, director: Michel Gondry (Chappelle’s flake-out/disappearing act a while back…does that make this film more or less intriguing?); Everything Is Illuminated, director: Liev Schreiber (might see it here); The Notorious Bettie Page, director: Mary Harron (essential for the period trimmings and sexy-photo stuff alone…Harron did an excellent job with American Psycho); Oliver Twist, director: Roman Polanski (can’t blow off Polanski, although I suspect he probably shot his last meaningful wad with The Pianist); Romance & Cigarettes, director: John Turturro (can’t bypass a singing James Gandolfini); Shopgirl, director: Anand Tucker (I’m hearing not great but fairly decent); Sketches of Frank Gehry, director: Sydney Pollack (gotta show respect to Pollack and Gehry); Slow Burn, director: Wayne Beach (waiting); Thank You For Smoking, director: Jason Reitman (sounds a bit obvious, but maybe): Tim Burton’s Corpse Bride, directors: Mike Johnson, Tim Burton (Burton is better with puppets than people, but it looks like The Nightmare before Xmas again); Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story, director: Michael Winterbottom (9 Songs didn’t do anything for Winterbottom’s rep, but this is supposed to be fairly good); Trust the Man, director: Bart Freundlich (always approach a Freundlich film with caution); Vers le Sud, director: Laurent Cantet (waiting to hear something); Wah-Wah, director: Richard E. Grant (ditto), The World’s Fastest Indian, director: Roger Donaldson (good buzz from Oz exhbitors about this one during their recent Australian Gold Coast convention, but Donaldson being from New Zealand suggests it should probably be taken with a grain). Keeper total: 10.
Charlize Theron in Niki Caro’s North Country
VIACOM GALAS (15): Dreamer: Inspired by a True Story, dierctor: John Gatins (any movie with the word “dreamer”…holding off for now); Edison, director: David J. Burke (waiting to hear something); Elizabethtown, director: Cameron Crowe (essential); L’ Enfer, director: Danis Tanovic (don’t know anything); A History of Violence, director: David Cronenberg (missed about 20 minutes worth in Cannes when I nodded off…want to see it again anyway); In Her Shoes, director: Curtis Hanson (exhib calls it an above-average chick flick and a little on the “commercial” side…Hanson-as-director means this has to be seen, but a serious film maven must always approach any film starring Cameron Diaz with a certain caution); The Matador, director: Richard Shepard (Sundance buzz was fairly good but nothing spectacular); Mrs. Harris, director: Phyllis Nagy (Bening and Kingsley…essential viewing for these two alone); Mrs. Henderson Presents, director: Stephen Frears (there’s no blowing off a Frears film); The Myth, director: Stanley Tong (skeptical); North Country, director: Niki Caro (return of Whale Rider director is an exciting prospect, but true-life story about a sexually harassed mine-worker sounds like a snooze, even with Charlize Theron in the role); Pride and Prejudice, director: Joe Wright (seeing it in NYC this week); Proof, director: John Madden (seen it, wrote about it); Revolver, director: Guy Ritchie (guarded optimism…post-Swept Away Ritchie requires extreme caution); The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, director: Tommy Lee Jones (fell for it in Cannes, looking to see it again); Walk the Line, director: James Mangold (saw it a few weeks ago, looking to go again just for the enjoyment); Water, director: Deepa Mehta (heard nothing); The White Masai, director: Hermine Huntgeburth (based on autobiographical book by Corinne Hofmann about a European white woman who falls head over heels for a Masai tribesman, blows off her boyfriend, uproots her life, etc.) Keeper total: 9.
Actual Bettie Page (i.e., receiving discipline) and not Gretchen Mol portraying the famous ’50s pin-up girl in Mary Harron’s The Notorious Bettie Page
VISIONS (6): 50 Ways of Saying Fabulous, director: Stewart Main (no hints); L’ Annulaire, director: Diane Bertrand (ditto); Brothers of the Head, directors: Keith Fulton, Louis Pepe (return of the Lost in La Mancha guys); Mary, director: Abel Ferrara (respect must be paid to Abel Ferrara, despite all the crap); The Piano-tuner of Earthquakes, directors: Timothy Quay, Stephen Quay (no hints); Wassup Rockers, director: Larry Clark (no clues). Keeper total: 2.
Add ’em up and at this early stage we’re looking at a grand keeper total of 31. Truth be told, I rarely seem to get to more than 25 or so films during a typical festival, although I’d love to crack 30 this time.
Grabs
Through windows of Dean & Deluca, SE corner of Broadway and Prince — Sunday, 8.21, 8:20 pm.
Only in New York City do you get this kind of stark aesthetic juxtaposition…one of the most beautiful dining-room decoration stores on the planet on the inside, and all kinds of heavy scaffolding and splattered paint and cheap-ass graffiti on the mailboxes outside.
Martin Scorsese, Matt Damon on set of the upcoming The Departed
James Mangold’s Walk the Line won’t be out until 11.18, but the 20th Century Fox marketing team is plugging it like a sonuvabitch. The Johnny Cash biopic has tribute pieces running in this week’s Time and Newsweek (particularly about Joaquin Pheonix and Reese Witherspoon’s performances) and now Fox has wild-posting all over Manhattan construction sites…which is fairly unusual for a film that won’t be opening for another three months.
Journos and industry types know Eamonn Bowles as the president of Magnolia Pictures, but he’s also the head of a kick-butt Iggy Pop-ish bar band called The Martinets. I saw them play last night at the Knitting Factory Tap Bar on Leonard Street (between B’way and Church), and was blown away — they’re really fast, tight and rock-sharp. The sound is raw and catchy and they all play like pros. Bowles sings like a mad banshee and plays electric guitar like a ringin’ a bell. It’s not just the usual bar-band “noise” but crafty, well-shaped material with intellectually pointed lyrics. I asked Bowles if Mark Cuban, the part-owner of Magnolia and a guy who reportedly gets around, has dropped by to catch the act. Bowles said nope.
All the milk that’s about to go bad and turn into cottage cheese, they send it to grocery stores in my Brooklyn neighborhood. I bought this last Sunday. The guarantee said it would be good until 8.25, and the next day all these gross little white globs poured out while I was trying to put milk in my coffee.
Playground at Spring and Mulberry — Sunday, 8.21, 5:45 pm.
Rice to Riches, located on Spring near Mulberry, is a stand-alone store that sells flavored rice puddings. Fantastic tasting, very filling, etc.
Facing south on La Guardia (I think…memory’s a bit hazy) — Sunday, 8.21, 7:15 pm.
And So It Begins
Once August is here the summer is basically over. Any marketer will tell you August isn’t the summer — it’s “August.” And that means contending with the likes of Must Love Dogs, Red Eye, The Dukes of Hazzard, Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo, Four Brothers, Pretty Persuasion and The 40 Year-Old Virgin already.
And this means that out of lethargy or some kind of psychological avoidance pattern people like myself are shifting into a September frame of mind (Toronto Film Festival!), which will quickly feed into October and the dawning of Oscar season. And none too soon.
Matthew Macfadyen, Keira Knightley in Joe Wright’s Pride & Prejudice
I’ve seen 23 films so far this year that I’d call somewhere between very good and exceptional, and out of these I’d say six or seven (The Constant Gardener, Crash, Hustle & Flow, Mad Hot Ballroom, Grizzly Man, Match Point, A History of Violence) may penetrate in terms of screenwriting, acting or best feature doc nominations.
There are about another 30 or so films opening between now and December 31st that may qualify also, so figure 35 or so films and their creators competing for everyone’s consideration, and out of these maybe 10 or 12 will wind up in the final lap.
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There’s very little I know right now but I’ve “heard” stuff, read some scripts, poked around and come up with some powerful hunches (Peter Jackson’s King Kong will only be up for only tech awards…heard that one?).
Let’s just jump into this and challenge some of those long-throw early-bird assumptions we’ve all been hearing from Dave Karger and David Poland and the like…prognosticators who, one gathers, are voicing some kind of assimilated community view. Let’s see about that.
Slap-Downs
Shakiest Presumed Best Picture Contender of All: Steven Spielberg’s Munich (Universal, 12.23) — I’m saying this because Spielberg isn’t a hardballer. He’s mushy at heart, and sentiment can swing either way at the drop of a hat, and is often a close relation of equivocation and accommodation. I’m seriously wondering if Spielberg has the cojones to handle this story about Mossad’s revenge upon the Palestinians behind the 1972 Munich killing of Israeli athletes without giving in to emotion or kowtowing to pro-Israeli sentiments by depicting the Palestinians as evil and subhuman.
Famous shot of Palestinian kidnapper during 1972 Munich Olympic Games standoff, almost certain to be used or recreated in some fashion in Steven Spielberg’s currently-rolling Munich (Universal, 12.23)
Munich costar Daniel Craig expressed the theme of this film as having something to do with the futility of revenge, but the hairs on the back of my neck are telling me Spielberg will finally go with a theme that says “revenge leaves a bitter aftertaste but when you’re eliminating some really wretched people who killed innocent Israeli athletes, it’s also kind of righteous.” If he doesn’t go this way and makes a film that, say, Costa-Gavras might have made in his late ’60s heyday, a lot of us will be delighted and amazed.
Jarhead isn’t Platoon — It’s More Like Full Metal Jacket . This was my guarded opinion after reading William Broyles, Jr.’s script last year. It may be something else entirely, its own thing, whatever…but I felt more of a dispassionate life-of-a-soldier thing than an emotional ride of any kind. I guess I’m just not feeling it quite yet, except for the reassuring notions of Sam Mendes (Road to Perdition, American Beauty) directing and Peter Sarsgaard costarring. (Universal, 11.11)
Second Shakiest Best Picture Contender: The Producers: The Movie Musical (Universal, 12.23). I say this because Susan Stroman, an obsequious Mel Brooks associate, is the director. If she follows Mel’s handbook to the letter the film will most likely wind up playing a little too something or other…broad, shameless, etc. (Mel Brooks was never Luis Bunuel.) Okay, there’s the Broadway and Tony Award momentum and yes, everyone loved the stage show and big brassy uppers sometimes do well with the Academy but c’mon….Susan Stroman?
Ziyi Zhang in Rob Marshall’s Memoirs of a Geisha
Heading For a Fall?: Memoirs of a Geisha (Columbia, 12.9) — This is one big-budget prestige movie that’s just waiting to get picked off because of the advance fatigue factor that I can sense all the way back here in Brooklyn. Ziyi Zhang as a woman from a Japanese fishing village who moves from one patron to the next and gradually becomes one of Japan’s most celebrated geishas…? See what I mean? Your eyelids are drooping as you read this.
There’s a premonition going around (I’m not the only one saying this) that it’s not going to play all that strongly with the public. And Rob Marshall having directed it is another grenade waiting to go off. The memory of Marshall’s Chicago having won the Best Picture Oscar over The Pianist two years ago still makes some of us twitch, and — honestly? — there would probably be a twinge of satisfaction in this corner if Memoirs of a Geisha were to fail, as a kind of payback-for-Chicago thing. An irrational, back-biting attitude? Sure, but unless Memoirs of a Geisha is some kind of masterwork such symmetrical notions may come into play.
Upticks
Has Cameron Crowe’s Time Arrived? — Neither Walter Parkes nor any Walter Parkes-minded uber-executive will have anything to say about the final shape of Elizabethtown (Paramount, 10.14) so maybe things will turn out this time for director-writer Cameron Crowe…better than they did with Almost Famous, I mean, which wasn’t fully appreciated until it came out on DVD as Untitled.
I read Elizabethtown way back when and I’m telling you it’s a peach, but I guess I shouldn’t be trusted, being a Crowe loyalist and all. This sad-funny story of a suicidal shoe designer (Orlando Bloom) getting in touch with his down-home Kentucky side during his father’s funeral and falling in love with Jean Arthur-like airline stewardess (Kirsten Dunst) definitely has the stuff. Crowe’s films dance to their own clock and work for their own reasons and they always pay off (except for Vanilla Sky), so I’m wondering why it even matters if the Academy gets on the bandwagon or not.
Orlando Bloom, Kirsten Dunst during filming of Cameron Crowe’s Elizabethtown (Paramount, 10.14)
Word is Just Starting on Pride & Prejudice, and While It May Not Be The Second Coming…: “I think when it comes to your Oscar forecasting you can’t ignore this one,” a New York journo told me this morning. “Focus has pushed it back to November so it will get more attention, and it deserves a look. It’s quite good with has a top-notch cast. I think Matthew Macfadyen is gonna get lots of attention as Mr. Darcy, and Brenda Blethyn looks like Supporting Actress material as Mrs. Bennet. Falco is handling.” Hey, Falco…can I see it? (Focus Features, 11.18)
Conceivables
* Terrence Malick’s The New World (New Line, 11.9) The script has heart and says all the right things. The trailer promises wonderful photography with that great pastoral particularity Malick is known for. Colin Farrell as Cpt. John Smith and what looks like a strong supporting turn by Christopher Plummer — these and other indicators are quite heartening.
* James Mangold’s Walk The Line (20th Century Fox, 11.18) Great performances, okay, but will Academy types feel a little funny about the notion of handing nominations to another period music bio one year after Ray? Is it fair to even bring this up? If a film works, it works.
Joaquin Pheonix as Johnny Cash in Walk the Line (20th Century Fox, 11.18)
* All The King’s Men (Columbia, 12.16) Don’t know a damn thing about this except it’s apparently a modern take on the Robert Penn Warren novel about the rise and all of a Huey Long-like southern politician. Sean Penn has to be fantastic in the lead role, but why after every acting job does he always say he’s taking two years off because he’s burned out? (I’m burned out myself, but I can’t afford to take even a week off. Guess that’s the difference between being a big-time actor and a journalist, huh?)
Buckshot
I could spend another several hours on this thing, but it’s almost 2 pm in New York and I can’t…
* Ask The Dust (Paramount Classics, December) — Labor of love and devotion for many years for director-writer Robert Towne. Can’t wait to see Colin Farrell play a quiet, internal character; ditto those South African visions of 1930s Los Angeles.
* The Constant Gardener (Focus Features, late August) — I’ll say it again: this is the best feature-length adaptation of a John Le Carre novel since The Spy Who Came In From The Cold. Well written, superbly photographed, and basically sublime all the way around the track. Perhaps a bit too subtle in some respects for some, but definitely not me. If only director Fernando Meirelles (City of God) hadn’t cast Danny Huston as the heavy…
Viggo Mortensen in David Cronenberg’s A History of Violence (New Line, 9.30)
* A History Of Violence (New Line, 9.30) — Cronenberg’s best film in a long time, but even the best Cronenbergs don’t tend to register as award-level films. Except for the acting, I mean. Viggo Mortensen, Bill Hurt, Maria Bello….each performance burns deep.
* Brokeback Mountain (Focus Features, 12.9) — Ang Lee’s gay cowboy drama… bend over, grab that hitching post and get ready to feel the heartbreak. Jake Gyllenhaal (who popped up on Defamer this morning re Ted Casablanca) and Heath Ledger…I don’t know. I’m an old cowhand from the Rio Grande.
* Syriana (Warner Bros., 12.9) — Feels kinda particular, political, subdued, male-ish. What do I actually know? What have I heard? Nothing.
* The Three Burials Of Melquiades Estrada (still no distributor, presumably opening later this year) — A likely Best Actor nomination for director Tommy Lee Jones, if nothing else. And lots of critical support if and when it opens later this year.
Heath Ledger, Stephen Gyllenhaal in Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain (Focus Features, 12.9)
* Crash (Lions Gate) — This punchy thoughtful little indie that made it big with the paying public deserves all the accolades it can get, especially for the script (Paul Haggis, Bobby Moresco) and for Don Cheadle’s performance.
* North Country (Warner Bros., 10.7) — The new film from Whale Rider‘s Niki Caro, about an actual sexual harassment case from the mid ’80s that involved a female miner. Charlize Theron, Frances McDormand, Woody Harrelson, Sissy Spacek.
* Get Rich or Die Tryin’ (Paramount, 11.11) — Something hit when I realized this biopic about 50 Cent’s life in the criminal lane would be out in November after wrapping in early July. And you can feel the energy from the trailer. Doesn’t 50 Cent have a video game coming out in November, and didn’t I hear him say something about wanting to have the #1 song, the #1 movie and the #1 video game out at the same time?
I can’t do any more. I’ll have to jump into Part Two next Wednesday, which will include potential acting, directing and screenwriting nominees.
Rent Defense
“So let me get this straight: because there’s an effective treatment for HIV, the movie musical of Rent is out of date?
“Why can’t it be appreciated for its music and for highlighting a period in American history when people were dying from a virus that had no effective treatment? (And by the way, most of the world still doesn’t have access to these drug cocktails that treat it.)
“I’m sorry but David Karger and David Poland’s reasoning for dissing the coming of Rent are totally absurd.
“I’m not sure how Chris Columbus, the director of the film version, has handled the ending but it was an odd ending to begin with by having Mimi come back from what appears to be septic coma. If you have a medical background you would know eventually within a year that a person like Mimi would have been dead due to her continued weakened immune system and no effective treatment to fight off the virus that killed off her CD4 count.
“On top of which Rent is not just about AIDS but about the plight of anyone looking at their mortality faced with a terminal illness. Get a clue.” — Nick Good
Wells to Good: I would add, Nick, that the story of anyone facing any life-threatening situation works as a metaphor for terms we all face, which is that life is short and very dear, and continued health is not something any of us can entirely count on. In other words, treasure life as much as you can while you’re here…right?
Grabs
Broken Flowers director Jim Jarmusch, costar Jessica Lange at Maritime Hotel party following premiere at Chelsea Cinemas — Wednesday, 7.7, 10:48 pm.
Stella’s Pizza, 110 Ninth Avenue between 17th and 18th Streets…excellent!
All those turn-the-other-cheek Christians who wrote in to complain about my disdain of this and that aspect of their trip should check out Bill McKibben’s thoughtful and very sincere look at their skewed spiritual attitudes in a piece called “The Christian Paradox: How a Faithful Nation Gets Jesus Wrong,” found on page 31 in the August issue of Harper’s. There’s another terrific piece in the same issue by Mark Crispin Miller called “None Dare Call It Stolen: Ohio, The Election and America’s Servile Press.”
Harry Winston-level jeweler David Yurman, Broken Flowers star Bill Murray in lobby of Clearview Cinema’s Chelsea West just prior to premiere showing of Jim Jarmusch film — Wednesday, 7.27, 7:05 pm.
There are more slow-walking tourist pudgeballs shuffling around in groups of four and five near this intersection than in any other part of town. Shot taken Wednesday, 7.27, 6:35 pm.
Saturday, 7.25, 12:25 am.
For what it’s worth, the most succinct, persuasive and elegantly written subway ad I’ve seen all summer.
Way over on 33rd Street, a block or two from the home of the New York Daily News. I don’t know why I’m even running shots like this. Movie art on a big building….so what?
The Hollywood Elsewhere news ticker went “live” as of roughly 4:30 pm today, and is now up and running! Congratulations and deepest thanks to the great Jim Stanley for hanging in there and making it work the way it was always supposed to. Thanks also to the creator of the software, a guy from Romania named Adamus Capuano. The speed of the copy is slightly faster on Internet Explorer than on Firefox (which I abruptly switched to last night) or Netscape, and the copy prematurely stops feeding on these two browsers as well as Safari, but we’ll be refining things and also adding new RSS feeds as we go along, etc. It looks pretty damn good for now.
To many, Carr explains later in the same New York Times piece, A Prairie Home Companion” is “a kind of secular religion.” Robert Altman, the film’s director, offers the following assessment: “Garrison [Keillor]’s audience is like the Mel Gibson Jesus audience. This movie is going to play for two weeks in places like Chicken Switch, Arizona, because the program has such strong rural appeal. The cast and myself will have our own audience to draw on. I think given that we have Meryl Streep and Lindsay Lohan, a lot of different people will be curious to see what this movie is about.” Chicken Switch! I love where Altman’s head’s at.
You can tell from reading Zach Helm’s script of Stranger Than Fiction that the movie, being directed by Marc Forster, will probably be a good score for everyone involved, including star Will Ferrell, when Columbia releases it next year. And Ferrell will kick ass in The Producers: The Movie Musical (Universal, 12.23) in the Franz Leibkind role — i.e., the one played by Kenneth Mars in Mel Brooks’ 1968 original. But it must be said right now that Ferrell is in trouble. Partly due to over-exposure (appearances in five films in ’05 not counting the un-released Winter Passing and The Wendell Baker Story). Partly because his stuff is feeling really labored and unfunny. Partly because Kicking and Screaming was awful and died. Partly because he was especially grating in Bewitched. Partly because his appearance in a forthcoming comedy is so unwelcome and groan-inducing he poisons the comic atmosphere and (temporarily) stops the film in its tracks. Is Ferrell over? Could the two-year spurt that began with ’03’s Old School and Elf, peaked with Anchorman and then received a late-inning boost from his appealing supporting performance in Melinda and Melinda be winding to a close…or am I just over-reacting to Ferrell’s death-cameo in that comedy I just referred to? What’s everyone thinking? Please send in reactions for a piece I’m going to cook up for Wednesday’s column.
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