We all know that screw-ups happen now and then, and this one’s not a rumor: the Technicolor tech guys who sent out screeners of Steven Spielberg’s Munich on behalf of NBC Universal have messed things up as far as members of the British Film Academy (BAFTA) are concerned. The purchase order on Universal’s part was correct, but somehow it wasn’t carried out right and BAFTA’s 3000-plus members “were sent encrypted ‘screener’ DVDs that were mastered for North America, and can only be played on special [multi-region] DVD players supplied by Cinea (www.cinea.com — a Dolby subsidiary),” according to a Boing-Boing correspondent. “First the DVDs were held up by UK customs, thereby missing the first-round voting deadline. But when they arrived, they would not play on any machine because they had been mastered for Region 1 (North America).” I made the call and an NBC Uni spokesman has confirmed the veracity of the report.
Depth of Feeling
In real life Roberta Maxwell, the gifted New York actress who’s quietly riveting as Jake Gyllenhaal’s bereaved mom during a four- or five-minute scene near the finale of Brokeback Mountain, barely resembles her emotionally bruised, hardscrabble character.
Her face is pale and plain and vaguely trembling in Ang Lee’s film, and with short, sort-of-mousey red hair. Very much a cowering but compassionate farmer’s wife from Wyoming. But the woman who opened her apartment door at 6 pm on New Year’s Eve was a pert and sophisticated New Yorker in glasses, her blondish-gray hair cut even shorter and her eyes the opposite of morose.
Roberta Maxwell during the second-to-last scene in Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain
Imagine that! An actress who can not only manipulate her appearance but do a little internal tossing of the emotional salad.
Maxwell isn’t the only Brokeback Mountain actress who supplies a strong dose of hurt — there’s also the excellent Kate Mara and Linda Cardellini as Heath Ledger’s daughter and jilted girlfriend, respectively, on top of Michelle Williams and Anne Hathaway’s lead performances as unhappy wives — but Maxwell makes her mark in what is arguably the film’s penultimate scene.
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It’s obvious that Maxwell’s mom and her scowling homophobic husband (played by the great Peter McRobbie) know what kind of relationship Ledger’s Ennis del Mar had with their son Jack, but her grief-ridden face is full of acceptance and compas- sion when del Mar pays a visit. And all of this hemmed in by fear of her husband’s rattlesnake temperament.
It’s the quiet but devastating interplay between Maxwell, McRobbie and Ledger that increases the film’s sadness to peak strength and sets up the film’s final hit, which comes when Mara tells Ledger she’s getting married to an oil-field worker named Kurt, and then leaves him alone in his trailer with Jack’s shirt hanging in the closet.
In fact, the more you watch Maxwell’s scene (I have a DVD screener of the film), the more clear it becomes that her underperforming of this exquisitely shot den- ouement is the emotional springboard of that last ten- or twelve-minute section. She’s got the whole film in her eyes.
Snapped about six hours before midnight in Maxwell’s Manhattan apartment — 12.31.05, 6:15 pm
And she had only a few hours to make it work.
Maxwell shot her footage in July 2004, not on a set but inside the rundown farm- house seen in the film, which is located about an hour outside Calgary, Alberta, which was a cheaper place to shoot than Wyoming, where most of the film’s story unfolds.
“When I arrived at the set, people were getting ready to leave,” she recalls. “It was the very end of the shoot.”
Jack’s mom is “a lifelong Pentecostal Christian,” says Maxwell. “And in this last scene we see this tension and fear about what she knows her husband feels about this relationship, and about great cruelty and suffering she has endured herself, but she shows compassion to Ennis because she can see Jack was obviously very much loved.”
Maxwell suspects that Brokeback Mountain‘s casting director Avy Kaufman arranged a meeting with director Ang Lee a few months earlier because she had played the mother of Sean Penn’s condemned prisoner in Dead Man Walking (’95) and “so I have a history of sad mothers.”
She sensed during her sit-down with Lee that “we had connected on a level that would make me a very strong competitor [for the part].”
Maxwell, Len Cariou and director Ethan McSweeny during a promotional stint on behalf of a relatively recent Pace University production of “The Persians.”
Brokeback Mountain had been showing to industry and festival audiences since early September, but Maxwell didn’t see it until it opened commercially on December 9th.
“I was really shocked by the scene, by our scene,” she recalls. “The starkness of it…the simplicity. And how [Lee] shot it, like when I put my hand on Heath’s shoul- der. I grabbed my friend sitting next to me. It was so strange, this old hand…I said to myself, is that mine?”
Maxwell began as a child actor in the ’50s, and has done lots of New York theatre, television, TV movies and features.
Her Dead Man Walking performance was, if you ask me, the big standout before Brokeback Mountain. She played the judge in Jonathan Demme’s Philadelphia (i.e., the one administering when Tom Hanks collapsed in court). And she had the lead female role in the 1975 debut stage production of Peter Shaffer’s Equus with costars Anthony Hopkins and Peter Firth. (That’s right…the naked-in-the-stables role.)
Maxwell was told in early October that her performance was special by none other than Annie Proulx, the author of the “Brokeback Mountain” short story that Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana’s screenplay is so closely based upon. The advance review came in the form of a letter, and it brought Maxwell to tears.
Sometime around ’76 or ’77
It reads: “Dear Roberta Maxwell — Just the right touch…the almost-crushed wife of a martinette who under his very nose and in only a few lines about cake and coffee, gets across the message that she knew and understood what Jack meant to Ennis. I don’t know how you did it in so small a compass. With much apprecia- tion, Annie Proulx.”
Maxwell read this to me aloud near the end of our talk. Here’s a recording of about half of it.
She asked last night how I think Brokeback Mountain will do at the Oscars, and when I repeated the conventional wisdom that it’s the Best Picture front-runner, she feigned surprise. I would play it that way if I were her.
Maxwell told the Toronto Star‘s Martin Knelman that she’ll be visiting Los Angeles soon “so I can enjoy the fun of Brokeback being touted for the Oscars. It’s such a special time and such a special film. Why not enjoy it while it lasts?”
If it were my call (and I can’t imagine Focus Features not feeling the same way), Maxwell will wind up sitting next to her costars and Lee and the film’s producer James Schamus and all the others at the Oscar Awards. If there’s anyone apart from the core players who deserves such an honor, it’s Maxwell.
I mean, c’mon, she’s the ninth-inning pinch hitter…the windup, the pitch…thwack!
Snowstorm Grabs
(l. to r.) Subway tracks leading from Marcy Street into Manhattan during height of yesterday afternoon’s very slushy snow storm — 12.31.05, 3:05 pm
Budget-level Chinese restaurant in Chinatown, near corner of Mott and Bayard.
There’s a character in Woody Allen’s What’s Up, Tiger Lily called Wing Fat, played by Susumu Kurobe…and the name was meant as an ethnic goof
Oh-Six Starters
There are four January releases that definitely cut the mustard in my pantry, and two or three with one or two problems but are recommended regardless. So things are starting off reasonably well. For a month known for so-so product, I mean.
The absolute must-see’s are Lajos Koltai’s Fateless (Thinkfilm, 1.6), Eugene Jarecki’s Why We Fight (Sony Pictures Classics, 1.20), Steven Soderbergh’s Bubble (Magnolia, 1.27) and Michael Winterbottom’s Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story (Picturehouse, 1.27).
From Lajos Koltai’s Fateless (and not what it seems to be)
The not-bad-with-reservations in order of preference are Ol Parker’s Imagine Me and You (Fox Searchlight, 1.27), Albert Brooks’ Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World (Warner Bros., 1.20) and Lars von Trier’s Manderlay (IFC Films, 1.27).
I’ve seen some others and can riff a bit about them, but aside from these six or seven we all know what January is about. That is, if you aren’t priveleged or con- nected enough to go to Sundance and you pay to see new movies in your local plex. It’s about feeling vaguely burned.
Or it’s about catching up with Xmas films and watching more DVDs than usual or maybe picking up a book…but the mood that settles over a multiplex in January is rarely expectant, much less electric.
Here’s what I know, have heard or am deducing thus far…
January 6: Fateless is the first near-great film of 2006. The exquisite widescreen framing, desaturated color and exquisite editing make it, to my eyes, the most visually immaculate Holocaust death-camp drama ever made (does that sound right?) as well as one of the most realistic seeming and subtly-rendered in terms of story.
Based on Imre Kertesz’s mostly true-life account, it’s about a young Jewish boy from Budapest who ends up in a concentration camp during World War II and just barely survives. It lacks the story tension and rooting factor of Polanski’s The Pianist, but situations of hunger, despair and the ashy aura of near-death have never been rendered with such remarkable pictorial finesse.
Otherwise, I’ve been told by a young guy I completely trust that Grandma’s Boy is absolutely atrocious. I don’t know about BloodRayne except for the hot babe in the poster. I’ve seen the Hostel trailer and that’s as far as I go. Not a very brave or engaging attitude, I’ll admit. (I generally loathe horror films even though I rather liked Wolf Creek, which so many other critics were deeply offended by.)
January 13: The only one I’ve seen is Laurence Dunmore’s The Libertine (Weinstein Co.) and the less said about it, the better. Johnny Depp is utterly dislikable as a smart but self-destructive Old World asshole named John Wilmot, the second Earl of Rochester. Muddy, desaturated color…gobs of period detail without no discernible spark of life…an almost completely detestable film.
The trailer for Kevin Reynolds’ Tristan & Isolde (20th Century Fox)…oh, no….oh, no….Rufus Sewell is in it. I’m sorry but that tears it. And please…not another swords-and-horses romantic triangle King Arthur– slash-First Knight-type thing. How can studio executives greenlight this stuff and still look at themselves in the mirror?
James Franco (Tristan) is a very fine and charismatic actor who can’t seem to catch a wave, much less a break. (He’s also in Justin Lin’s Annapolis, opening on 1.27.) Sophia Myles, whom I liked in Art School Confidential, is a very intelligent, seemingly passionate actress with a very chubby moon face. Curvy, not-slim actresses are becoming more and more common these days, but there haven’t been any high-wattage moon-faced actresses since the days of Theda Bara.
Misty Wilkins, hot-stuff star of Steven Soderbergh’s Bubble
And zipposky on April’s Shower, Glory Road, Hoodwinked, Last Holiday, On The Outs.
January 20: Eugene Jarecki’s Why We Fight is not just the best film being released on this date but sure to be listed among the year’s (and probably the decade’s) finest also. A brilliantly told history of America’s military industrial complex and war machine. And very well made…well paced…totally blue-chip all the way. John McCain, Gore Vidal, William Kristol, Chalmers Johnson and Richard Perle are among the talking heads.
There are good things — more than a few good things — in Albert Brooks’ Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World (Warner Bros.). It’s dry and disciplined and somewhat amusing here and there, but it has an older guy’s energy levels and — frankly? — not that great a story.
You’d think a movie about what makes Muslims laugh would at least take a stab at answering this question. And it would have worked better if Brooks (playing himself) had somehow managed to visit the real Muslim world (Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, et. al.) instead of India, where most of this film takes place.
India is not where the terrorists are. Call for tech support and a very polite idiot who knows absolutely nothing about how to help you with your problem…that‘s India.
Albert Brooks (l.) in Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World
You know that Underworld: Evolution (Screen Gems), the Underword sequel, is solely about trying to grab a portion of the $100 million earned by the original. With Kate Beckinsdale and Scott Speedman reprising their roles, what are the odds of this being any more that the usual breathy-moldy-sexy CGI vampire-werewolf crap?
The trailer certainly gives every indication it’s a straight programmer and strictly a paycheck movie for the talent. If it rises even a tiny bit above the level of pure bilge I will buy a red rubber enema bag and do the appropriate thing.
Nothing about End of the Spear, Pizza, The Real Dirt on Farmer John.
January 27: Bubble is a minimalist murder tale from Steven Soderbergh, shot on video with non-pro actors. It’s a very clean, creepy and absorbing piece. It’s modest but damn fine within its perimeter. I consider Bubble Soderbergh’s return to form — the first high-grade wow thing he’s done since Traffic.
I wrote during the Toronto Film Festival that “as far as I’m concerned Bubble, a heart-of-proletariat-darkness drama, is reason to pop open the champagne and breathe easy. Soderbergh was falling off the horse repeatedly with Full Frontal, Solaris and the two Ocean‘s movies…but he hunkered down and stayed with the process and that constant-state-of-becoming trip that all artists need to be into, and now he’s back.”
Oh Parker’s Imagine Me and You, which I saw at Toronto, is one of those rotely British romantic confections, although nowhere near as sickening as Love Actually and for the most part a reasonably decent and even (at times) touching thing.
It’s about a woman (Piper Parabo) who falls in love with another woman (Lena Headley) on her wedding day…which leaves her husband Heck (Matthew Goode) confused and out in the cold. It’s formulaic and tidy, although at times I could feel the capability on Parker’s part (if not the willingness) to make a complex adult relationship drama along the lines of John Schlesinger’s Sunday Bloody Sunday.
I didn’t hear a single unkind word about Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story during the Toronto Film Festival, so even though I didn’t see it myself it seems like a reasonably safe call to put it on the recommend list.
It’s basically the bone-dry British funnyman Steve Coogan starring in some kind of smart-ass variation of Karel Reisz’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1982). It’s a film about the making of an historical film — an adaptation of Laurence Stern’s “The Life and Opinions of Tristram Sahndy, Gentlemen” — while at the same time a look at the historical characters as well as the actors portraying them.
Willem Dafoe, Bryce Dallas Howard in Lars von Trier’s Manderlay
After seeing Lars von Trier’s Manderlay in Cannes last May I wrote that “it didn’t do it for me, and I’m speaking as a totally ardent fan of von Trier’s Dogville, Dancer in the Dark and Breaking the Waves, as well as being a general fool for his bad-boy provocations.
“It’s a relentlessly talky, intelligent and provocative film that addresses…well, American racism, certainly, but more generally a do-gooder tendency by American governments to try and shape other societies so they more resemble our own (Iraq, Vietnam, etc.). And it indulges in the usual proddings and agitations that are par for this Danish filmmaker.
“The second installment in von Trier’s America trilogy, Manderlay is a continuation of the adventures of Grace, the gangster’s daughter played by Nicole Kidman in Dogville, the trilogy’s 2003 kickoff, and by Bryce Dallas Howard in the new film.
Sophia Miles, James Franco in Kevin Reynolds’ Tristan and Isolde
“Both films are stagey and pedantically inclined, and shot on what is probably the same massive sound stage with imaginary props and sets. (The third installment will presumably follow suit.)
“Manderlay is too similar to Dogville and not similar enough. Despite its slow pace and too-gradual plot development, Dogville had a surprise revelation (Kidman is the daughter of gangster James Caan, and not his girlfriend, as the film allows us to assume at first) and a shockingly violent finale that expressed von Trier’s negative feelings about what he sees as American tendencies to exploit the less fortunate.
“Like Dogville it’s broken up by titled chapters, John Hurt again provides the dry and pungent narration, and the closing credit sequence is nearly identical with the same David Bowie song (‘Young Americans’) played over a series of stills that illuminate the uglier aspects of America’s history — in this instance the treatment of African-Americans over the last century or so.
“But there’s no big jolt or surprise at the finale — you can pretty much tell what’s coming from the get-go — and it so closely recalls Dogville‘s aching-butt aspects that watching it feels like a chore.
Eugene Jarecki discussing Why We Fight at the 2005 Sundance Film Festival
Otherwise…
Annapolis isn’t a precise revisiting of An Officer and a Gentleman but it’s obviously on similar turf with the element of boxing thrown in. Annapolis, boxing…Annapolis, boxing. Better Luck Tomorrow helmer Justin Lin is the director, and I should just keep my mouth shut until I see it.
Big Momma’s House 2 can have coitus with itself. Breaking News looks to me like a standard-issue Hong Kong cop thriller, and I’m not vigorous enough to try and figure the real truth of it. Mirage, Nanny McPhee and the IMAX film Roving Mars haven’t yet come into focus.
You don’t have confuse Tristram Shandy with Tristan and Isolde — “Tristram” has two r’s and the movie is fairly jaunty and flip, and the other one is bold-faced sincere.
Grabs
(l. to r.) Occasional Hollywood Elsewhere columnist Dylan Wells, Becca Payne and producer-screenwriter L.M. Kit Carson at Columbia student bar at Broadway and 113th Street — Tuesday, 12.27, 10:15 pm
On IRT Lexington uptown — Saturday, 12.24, 3:10 pm.
Troubador in waiting area for Union Square L line to Brooklyn — Monday, 12.26, 11:25 pm.
$30 jar of ginger orange foam scrub, purchased at Sabon on Spring Street on Sunday, 12.25, 8:40 pm.
Mott Street in Little Italy — Thursday, 12.29, 8:20 pm.
Canal Street near Manhattan Bridge — Thursday, 12.29, 7:15 pm.
Grand Central Station — Tuesday, 12.27, 4:25 pm.
On L train heading to Brooklyn — Tuesday, 1.27, 11:45 pm
What would Nic Cage (or a character played by him), Joan of Arc and Oliver Reed’s “Father Grandier” character in The Devils have in common? Something, I think…unless Neil Labute has decided to re-shuffle the story of The Wicker Man.
Thurday, 12.29, 8:15 pm.
Herzog vs. Huffman
“Thanks for celebrating Werner Herzog, the most amazing director working today. However…
“While I don’t disagree with you and Time‘s Richard Corliss for celebrating his little seen recent, wonderful documentary The White Diamond, I wonder if you were aware just how contrived the film is.
“Recently Herzog was in Seattle for a short festival of some of his recent films and in the q & a session afterwards he explained that pretty much everything said in the interview sessions in the film (particularly from the talkative local man who owned the rooster) was completely scripted.
“Herzog said it in way that made it seem like he would be stunned if anyone could possibly think it was done any other way. He described in detail how he wrote complete speeches for the folks and how they would struggle to deliver them (the speeches are basically based on his conversations with the interviewees and Herzog’s own thoughts).
“If anything, knowing that this is how Herzog constructs his documentaries makes me like them even more. All documentaries are a succession of lies that form a particular person’s greater truth. I am just surprised that Herzog seemed to assume that everyone else was in on the secret.” — Richard Huffman, Seattle, WA.
Werner Herzog replies: “Jeffrey — [Huffman’s] questions about The White Diamond are too simplified. Why would I who postulates a cinema where you can trust your eyes again (Fitzcarraldo) ‘concoct’ elements of his ‘documentaries’?
“My inventions and stylizations aim to penetrate into a deeper truth, whereas Reality TV only pretends to depict the ‘real’ but captures just facts, and not truth.
“I have to be more precise to distinguish between two major issues:
“1. Whenever it comes to visual material, I want audiences to trust their eyes again, like the ship over a mountain (Fitzcarraldo). When I use a digital effect, like at the end of Invincible where the strongman’s kid brother flies away across the ocean: it is so obvious, and so stylized, and embedded in the dialogue that it is no contradiction to what I like to achieve.
“I welcome the recreation of dinosaurs on the screen.
“Equally: everything which constitutes the hardcore identity of a protagonist in my “documentaries” I would not touch (Littlre Dieter Needs to Fly, Grizzlly Man, Wings of Hope, etc.). However, I do invent Dieter’s dreams, and I do stage elements of his character (otherwise not visible), like Dieter opening and closing the door of his home. This is the ecstatic truth of his existence.
“2. Whatever I can do to get beyond the mere facts…to get deeper into a story of a ‘documentary’…to grasp a truth in its ecstatic state, I will do. The story of Graham Dorrington remains untouched, the catastrophy which befell Dieter Plage, the cinematographer, during his maiden flight on board Dorrington’s airship, happened as narrated, yet: I liked a seemingly unimportant side figure, Mark Anthony Jhap so much that I manoeuvred him more and more into the center – or rather epicenter – of the film. The leading character shifts from Dorrington to Mark Anthony, and at the end to Mark Anthony’s splendid rooster.
“The scene where Mark Anthony leads the camera during his foraging trip to the waterfall, watching it through one single drop of water, is completely scripted, and staged, and rehearsed. From off camera I am asking the most insipid New Age question: ‘Mark Anthony, do you see a whole universe in one single drop of water’, and Mark Anthony turns around with a slight smirk on his face, and responds: ‘I cannot hear what you say for the thunder that you are.’ I believe I shot the scene 5 or 6 times until I got the right, almost imperceptible smirk.
“Mark Anthony’s sentence appears verbatim in a previous film,
“What you and your audience also should be aware of is the fact that the drop of water was not water, but glycerin which has better properties for filming. Klaus Scheurich, a very accomplished wildlife cinematographer, shot this drop of ‘water’ with the inverted waterfall caught in it, and this — at first sight — looked like kitsch, but I got hooked to the image, and I was convinced that this waterdrop embedded in an environment of sheer fantasy would assume a different, a higher, an ecstatic quality.
“I think that this delicate line between reality, and fact, and truth needs to be more clearly defined. My Minnesota Declaration (you’ll find it on my website) does this. But what has to be made more clear is: with the onslaught of virtual realities WE HAVE TO RE-DEFINE REALITY: beyond Cinema Verite, beyond the documen- taries we usually see on TV, beyond the terrain which is not solid any longer, as if we were treading on thin ice.” – Werner Herzog
Oh-Six Starters
There are four January releases that definitely cut the mustard in my pantry, and two or three with one or two problems but are recommended regardless. So things are starting off reasonably well. For a month known for so-so product, I mean.
The absolute must-see’s are Lajos Koltai’s Fateless (Thinkfilm, 1.6), Eugene Jarecki’s Why We Fight (Sony Pictures Classics, 1.20), Steven Soderbergh’s Bubble (Magnolia, 1.27) and Michael Winterbottom’s Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story (Picturehouse, 1.27).
From Lajos Koltai’s Fateless (and not what it seems to be)
The not-bad-with-reservations in order of preference are Ol Parker’s Imagine Me and You (Fox Searchlight, 1.27), Albert Brooks’ Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World (Warner Bros., 1.20) and Lars von Trier’s Manderlay (IFC Films, 1.27).
I’ve seen some others and can riff a bit about them, but aside from these six or seven we all know what January is about. That is, if you aren’t priveleged or con- nected enough to go to Sundance and you pay to see new movies in your local plex. It’s about feeling vaguely burned.
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Or it’s about catching up with Xmas films and watching more DVDs than usual or maybe picking up a book…but the mood that settles over a multiplex in January is rarely expectant, much less electric.
Here’s what I know, have heard or am deducing thus far…
January 6: Fateless is the first near-great film of 2006. The exquisite widescreen framing, desaturated color and exquisite editing make it, to my eyes, the most visually immaculate Holocaust death-camp drama ever made (does that sound right?) as well as one of the most realistic seeming and subtly-rendered in terms of story.
Based on Imre Kertesz’s mostly true-life account, it’s about a young Jewish boy from Budapest who ends up in a concentration camp during World War II and just barely survives. It lacks the story tension and rooting factor of Polanski’s The Pianist, but situations of hunger, despair and the ashy aura of near-death have never been rendered with such remarkable pictorial finesse.
Otherwise, I’ve been told by a young guy I completely trust that Grandma’s Boy is absolutely atrocious. I don’t know about BloodRayne except for the hot babe in the poster. I’ve seen the Hostel trailer and that’s as far as I go. Not a very brave or engaging attitude, I’ll admit. (I generally loathe horror films even though I rather liked Wolf Creek, which so many other critics were deeply offended by.)
January 13: The only one I’ve seen is Laurence Dunmore’s The Libertine (Weinstein Co.) and the less said about it, the better. Johnny Depp is utterly dislikable as a smart but self-destructive Old World asshole named John Wilmot, the second Earl of Rochester. Muddy, desaturated color…gobs of period detail without no discernible spark of life…an almost completely detestable film.
The trailer for Kevin Reynolds’ Tristan & Isolde (20th Century Fox)…oh, no….oh, no….Rufus Sewell is in it. I’m sorry but that tears it. And please…not another swords-and-horses romantic triangle King Arthur– slash-First Knight-type thing. How can studio executives greenlight this stuff and still look at themselves in the mirror?
James Franco (Tristan) is a very fine and charismatic actor who can’t seem to catch a wave, much less a break. (He’s also in Justin Lin’s Annapolis, opening on 1.27.) Sophia Myles, whom I liked in Art School Confidential, is a very intelligent, seemingly passionate actress with a very chubby moon face. Curvy, not-slim actresses are becoming more and more common these days, but there haven’t been any high-wattage moon-faced actresses since the days of Theda Bara.
Misty Wilkins, hot-stuff star of Steven Soderbergh’s Bubble
And zipposky on April’s Shower, Glory Road, Hoodwinked, Last Holiday, On The Outs.
January 20: Eugene Jarecki’s Why We Fight is not just the best film being released on this date but sure to be listed among the year’s (and probably the decade’s) finest also. A brilliantly told history of America’s military industrial complex and war machine. And very well made…well paced…totally blue-chip all the way. John McCain, Gore Vidal, William Kristol, Chalmers Johnson and Richard Perle are among the talking heads.
There are good things — more than a few good things — in Albert Brooks’ Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World (Warner Bros.). It’s dry and disciplined and somewhat amusing here and there, but it has an older guy’s energy levels and — frankly? — not that great a story.
You’d think a movie about what makes Muslims laugh would at least take a stab at answering this question. And it would have worked better if Brooks (playing himself) had somehow managed to visit the real Muslim world (Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, et. al.) instead of India, where most of this film takes place.
India is not where the terrorists are. Call for tech support and a very polite idiot who knows absolutely nothing about how to help you with your problem…that‘s India.
Albert Brooks (l.) in Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World
You know that Underworld: Evolution (Screen Gems), the Underword sequel, is solely about trying to grab a portion of the $100 million earned by the original. With Kate Beckinsdale and Scott Speedman reprising their roles, what are the odds of this being any more that the usual breathy-moldy-sexy CGI vampire-werewolf crap?
The trailer certainly gives every indication it’s a straight programmer and strictly a paycheck movie for the talent. If it rises even a tiny bit above the level of pure bilge I will buy a red rubber enema bag and do the appropriate thing.
Nothing about End of the Spear, Pizza, The Real Dirt on Farmer John.
January 27: Bubble is a minimalist murder tale from Steven Soderbergh, shot on video with non-pro actors. It’s a very clean, creepy and absorbing piece. It’s modest but damn fine within its perimeter. I consider Bubble Soderbergh’s return to form — the first high-grade wow thing he’s done since Traffic.
I wrote during the Toronto Film Festival that “as far as I’m concerned Bubble, a heart-of-proletariat-darkness drama, is reason to pop open the champagne and breathe easy. Soderbergh was falling off the horse repeatedly with Full Frontal, Solaris and the two Ocean‘s movies…but he hunkered down and stayed with the process and that constant-state-of-becoming trip that all artists need to be into, and now he’s back.”
Oh Parker’s Imagine Me and You, which I saw at Toronto, is one of those rotely British romantic confections, although nowhere near as sickening as Love Actually and for the most part a reasonably decent and even (at times) touching thing.
It’s about a woman (Piper Parabo) who falls in love with another woman (Lena Headley) on her wedding day…which leaves her husband Heck (Matthew Goode) confused and out in the cold. It’s formulaic and tidy, although at times I could feel the capability on Parker’s part (if not the willingness) to make a complex adult relationship drama along the lines of John Schlesinger’s Sunday Bloody Sunday.
I didn’t hear a single unkind word about Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story during the Toronto Film Festival, so even though I didn’t see it myself it seems like a reasonably safe call to put it on the recommend list.
It’s basically the bone-dry British funnyman Steve Coogan starring in some kind of smart-ass variation of Karel Reisz’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1982). It’s a film about the making of an historical film — an adaptation of Laurence Stern’s “The Life and Opinions of Tristram Sahndy, Gentlemen” — while at the same time a look at the historical characters as well as the actors portraying them.
Willem Dafoe, Bryce Dallas Howard in Lars von Trier’s Manderlay
After seeing Lars von Trier’s Manderlay in Cannes last May I wrote that “it didn’t do it for me, and I’m speaking as a totally ardent fan of von Trier’s Dogville, Dancer in the Dark and Breaking the Waves, as well as being a general fool for his bad-boy provocations.
“It’s a relentlessly talky, intelligent and provocative film that addresses…well, American racism, certainly, but more generally a do-gooder tendency by American governments to try and shape other societies so they more resemble our own (Iraq, Vietnam, etc.). And it indulges in the usual proddings and agitations that are par for this Danish filmmaker.
“The second installment in von Trier’s America trilogy, Manderlay is a continuation of the adventures of Grace, the gangster’s daughter played by Nicole Kidman in Dogville, the trilogy’s 2003 kickoff, and by Bryce Dallas Howard in the new film.
Sophia Miles, James Franco in Kevin Reynolds’ Tristan and Isolde
“Both films are stagey and pedantically inclined, and shot on what is probably the same massive sound stage with imaginary props and sets. (The third installment will presumably follow suit.)
“Manderlay is too similar to Dogville and not similar enough. Despite its slow pace and too-gradual plot development, Dogville had a surprise revelation (Kidman is the daughter of gangster James Caan, and not his girlfriend, as the film allows us to assume at first) and a shockingly violent finale that expressed von Trier’s negative feelings about what he sees as American tendencies to exploit the less fortunate.
“Like Dogville it’s broken up by titled chapters, John Hurt again provides the dry and pungent narration, and the closing credit sequence is nearly identical with the same David Bowie song (‘Young Americans’) played over a series of stills that illuminate the uglier aspects of America’s history — in this instance the treatment of African-Americans over the last century or so.
“But there’s no big jolt or surprise at the finale — you can pretty much tell what’s coming from the get-go — and it so closely recalls Dogville‘s aching-butt aspects that watching it feels like a chore.
Eugene Jarecki discussing Why We Fight at the 2005 Sundance Film Festival
Otherwise…
Annapolis isn’t a precise revisiting of An Officer and a Gentleman but it’s obviously on similar turf with the element of boxing thrown in. Annapolis, boxing…Annapolis, boxing. Better Luck Tomorrow helmer Justin Lin is the director, and I should just keep my mouth shut until I see it.
Big Momma’s House 2 can have coitus with itself. Breaking News looks to me like a standard-issue Hong Kong cop thriller, and I’m not vigorous enough to try and figure the real truth of it. Mirage, Nanny McPhee and the IMAX film Roving Mars haven’t yet come into focus.
You don’t have confuse Tristram Shandy with Tristan and Isolde — “Tristram” has two r’s and the movie is fairly jaunty and flip, and the other one is bold-faced sincere.
Grabs
(l. to r.) Occasional Hollywood Elsewhere columnist Dylan Wells, Becca Payne and producer-screenwriter L.M. Kit Carson at Columbia student bar at Broadway and 113th Street — Tuesday, 12.27, 10:15 pm
On IRT Lexington uptown — Saturday, 12.24, 3:10 pm.
Troubador in waiting area for Union Square L line to Brooklyn — Monday, 12.26, 11:25 pm.
$30 jar of ginger orange foam scrub, purchased at Sabon on Spring Street on Sunday, 12.25, 8:40 pm.
Mott Street in Little Italy — Thursday, 12.29, 8:20 pm.
Canal Street near Manhattan Bridge — Thursday, 12.29, 7:15 pm.
Grand Central Station — Tuesday, 12.27, 4:25 pm.
On L train heading to Brooklyn — Tuesday, 1.27, 11:45 pm
What would Nic Cage (or a character played by him), Joan of Arc and Oliver Reed’s “Father Grandier” character in The Devils have in common? Something, I think…unless Neil Labute has decided to re-shuffle the story of The Wicker Man.
Thurday, 12.29, 8:15 pm.
Herzog vs. Huffman
“Thanks for celebrating Werner Herzog, the most amazing director working today. However…
“While I don’t disagree with you and Time‘s Richard Corliss for celebrating his little seen recent, wonderful documentary The White Diamond, I wonder if you were aware just how contrived the film is.
“Recently Herzog was in Seattle for a short festival of some of his recent films and in the q & a session afterwards he explained that pretty much everything said in the interview sessions in the film (particularly from the talkative local man who owned the rooster) was completely scripted.
“Herzog said it in way that made it seem like he would be stunned if anyone could possibly think it was done any other way. He described in detail how he wrote complete speeches for the folks and how they would struggle to deliver them (the speeches are basically based on his conversations with the interviewees and Herzog’s own thoughts).
“If anything, knowing that this is how Herzog constructs his documentaries makes me like them even more. All documentaries are a succession of lies that form a particular person’s greater truth. I am just surprised that Herzog seemed to assume that everyone else was in on the secret.” — Richard Huffman, Seattle, WA.
Werner Herzog replies: “Jeffrey — [Huffman’s] questions about The White Diamond are too simplified. Why would I who postulates a cinema where you can trust your eyes again (Fitzcarraldo) ‘concoct’ elements of his ‘documentaries’?
“My inventions and stylizations aim to penetrate into a deeper truth, whereas Reality TV only pretends to depict the ‘real’ but captures just facts, and not truth.
“I have to be more precise to distinguish between two major issues:
“1. Whenever it comes to visual material, I want audiences to trust their eyes again, like the ship over a mountain (Fitzcarraldo). When I use a digital effect, like at the end of Invincible where the strongman’s kid brother flies away across the ocean: it is so obvious, and so stylized, and embedded in the dialogue that it is no contradiction to what I like to achieve.
“I welcome the recreation of dinosaurs on the screen.
“Equally: everything which constitutes the hardcore identity of a protagonist in my “documentaries” I would not touch (Littlre Dieter Needs to Fly, Grizzlly Man, Wings of Hope, etc.). However, I do invent Dieter’s dreams, and I do stage elements of his character (otherwise not visible), like Dieter opening and closing the door of his home. This is the ecstatic truth of his existence.
“2. Whatever I can do to get beyond the mere facts…to get deeper into a story of a ‘documentary’…to grasp a truth in its ecstatic state, I will do. The story of Graham Dorrington remains untouched, the catastrophy which befell Dieter Plage, the cinematographer, during his maiden flight on board Dorrington’s airship, happened as narrated, yet: I liked a seemingly unimportant side figure, Mark Anthony Jhap so much that I manoeuvred him more and more into the center – or rather epicenter – of the film. The leading character shifts from Dorrington to Mark Anthony, and at the end to Mark Anthony’s splendid rooster.
“The scene where Mark Anthony leads the camera during his foraging trip to the waterfall, watching it through one single drop of water, is completely scripted, and staged, and rehearsed. From off camera I am asking the most insipid New Age question: ‘Mark Anthony, do you see a whole universe in one single drop of water’, and Mark Anthony turns around with a slight smirk on his face, and responds: ‘I cannot hear what you say for the thunder that you are.’ I believe I shot the scene 5 or 6 times until I got the right, almost imperceptible smirk.
“Mark Anthony’s sentence appears verbatim in a previous film,
“What you and your audience also should be aware of is the fact that the drop of water was not water, but glycerin which has better properties for filming. Klaus Scheurich, a very accomplished wildlife cinematographer, shot this drop of ‘water’ with the inverted waterfall caught in it, and this — at first sight — looked like kitsch, but I got hooked to the image, and I was convinced that this waterdrop embedded in an environment of sheer fantasy would assume a different, a higher, an ecstatic quality.
“I think that this delicate line between reality, and fact, and truth needs to be more clearly defined. My Minnesota Declaration (you’ll find it on my website) does this. But what has to be made more clear is: with the onslaught of virtual realities WE HAVE TO RE-DEFINE REALITY: beyond Cinema Verite, beyond the documen- taries we usually see on TV, beyond the terrain which is not solid any longer, as if we were treading on thin ice.” – Werner Herzog
Oh-Six Starters
There are four January releases that definitely cut the mustard in my pantry, and two or three with one or two problems but are recommended regardless. So things are starting off reasonably well. For a month known for so-so product, I mean.
The absolute must-see’s are Lajos Koltai’s Fateless (Thinkfilm, 1.6), Eugene Jarecki’s Why We Fight (Sony Pictures Classics, 1.20), Steven Soderbergh’s Bubble (Magnolia, 1.27) and Michael Winterbottom’s Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story (Picturehouse, 1.27).
From Lajos Koltai’s Fateless (and not what it seems to be)
The not-bad-with-reservations in order of preference are Ol Parker’s Imagine Me and You (Fox Searchlight, 1.27), Albert Brooks’ Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World (Warner Bros., 1.20) and Lars von Trier’s Manderlay (IFC Films, 1.27).
I’ve seen some others and can riff a bit about them, but aside from these six or seven we all know what January is about. That is, if you aren’t priveleged or con- nected enough to go to Sundance and you pay to see new movies in your local plex. It’s about feeling vaguely burned.
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Or it’s about catching up with Xmas films and watching more DVDs than usual or maybe picking up a book…but the mood that settles over a multiplex in January is rarely expectant, much less electric.
Here’s what I know, have heard or am deducing thus far…
January 6: Fateless is the first near-great film of 2006. The exquisite wide-screen framing, destaurated color and exquisite editing make it, to my eyes, the most visually immaculate Holocaust death-camp drama ever made as well as one of the most realistic seeming and subtly-rendered in terms of story.
Based on Imre Kertesz’s mostly true-life account, it’s about a young Jewish boy from Budapest who ends up in a concentration camp during World War II and just barely survives. It lacks the story tension and rooting factor of Polanski’s The Pianist, but situations of hunger, despair and the ashy aura of near-death have never been rendered with such remarkable pictorial finesse.
Otherwise, I’ve been told by a young guy I completely trust that Grandma’s Boy is absolutely atrocious. I don’t know about BloodRayne except for the hot babe in the poster. I’ve seen the Hostel trailer and that’s as far as I go. Not a very brave or engaging attitude, I’ll admit. (I generally loathe horror films even though I rather liked Wolf Creek, which so many other critics were deeply offended by.)
January 13: The only one I’ve seen is Laurence Dunmore’s The Libertine (Weinstein Co.) and the less said about it, the better. Johnny Depp is utterly dislikable as a smart but self-destructive Old World asshole named John Wilmot, the second Earl of Rochester. Muddy, desaturated color…gobs of period detail without no discernible spark of life…an almost completely detestable film.
The trailer for Kevin Reynolds’ Tristan & Isolde (20th Century Fox)…oh, no….oh, no….Rufus Sewell is in it. I’m sorry but that tears it. And please…not another swords-and-horses romantic triangle King Arthur– slash-First Knight-type deal. How can studio executives greenlight these things and still look themselves in the mirror?
James Franco (Tristan) is a very fine and charismatic actor who can’t seem to catch a wave, much less a break. (He’s also in Justin Lin’s Annapolis, opening on 1.27.) Sophia Myles, whom I liked in Art School Confidential, is a very intelligent, seemingly passionate actress with a very chubby moon face. Curvy, not-slim actresses are becoming more and more common these days, but there haven’t been any high-wattage moon-faced actresses since the days of Theda Bara.
Misty Wilkins, hot-stuff star of Steven Soderbergh’s Bubble
And zipposky on April’s Shower, Glory Road, Hoodwinked, Last Holiday, On The Outs.
January 20: Eugene Jarecki’s Why We Fight is not just the best film being released on this date but sure to be listed among the year’s (and probably the decade’s) finest also. A brilliantly told history of America’s military industrial complex and war machine. And very well made…well paced…totally blue-chip all the way. John McCain, Gore Vidal, William Kristol, Chalmers Johnson and Richard Perle are among the talking heads.
There are good things — more than a few good things — in Albert Brooks’ Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World (Warner Bros.). It’s dry and disciplined and somewhat amusing here and there, but it has an older guy’s energy levels and — frankly? — not that great a story.
You’d think a movie about what makes Muslims laugh would at least take a stab at answering this question. And it would have worked better if Brooks (playing himself) had somehow managed to visit the real Muslim world (Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, et. al.) instead of India, where most of this film takes place. India is not where the terrorists are. Call for tech support and a very polite idiot who knows absolutely nothing about how to help you with your problem…that‘s India.
Albert Brooks (l.) in Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World
You know what Underworld: Evolution (Screen Gems), the Underword sequel, is just a cynical money grab because Underworld made $100 million or so. It looks to me like more breathy-moldy-sexy CGI vampire-werewolf crap with Kate Beckinsdale and Scott Speedman.
The trailer certainly gives every indication it’s a programmer and strictly a paycheck movie for the talent. If it rises even a tiny bit above the level of pure bilge I will buy a red rubber enema bag and do the appropriate thing.
Nothing about End of the Spear, Pizza, The Real Dirt on Farmer John.
January 27: Bubble is a minimalist murder tale from Steven Soderbergh, shot on video with non-pro actors. It’s a very clean, creepy and absorbing piece. It’s modest but damn fine within its perimeter. I consider Bubble Soderbergh’s return to form — the first high-grade wow thing he’s done since Traffic.
I wrote during the Toronto Film Festival that “as far as I’m concerned Bubble, a heart-of-proletariat-darkness drama, is reason to pop open the champagne and breathe easy. Soderbergh was falling off the horse repeatedly with Full Frontal, Solaris and the two Ocean‘s movies…but he hunkered down and stayed with the process and that constant-state-of-becoming trip that all artists need to be into, and now he’s back.”
Oh Parker’s Imagine Me and You, which I saw at Toronto, is one of those rotely British romantic confections, although nowhere near as sickening as Love Actually and for the most part a reasonably decent and even (at times) touching thing.
It’s about a woman (Piper Parabo) who falls in love with another woman (Lena Headley) on her wedding day…which leaves her husband Heck (Matthew Goode) confused and out in the cold. It’s formulaic and tidy, although at times I could feel the capability on Parker’s part (if not the willingness) to make a complex adult relationship drama along the lines of John Schlesinger’s Sunday Bloody Sunday.
I didn’t hear a single unkind word about Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story during the Toronto Film Festival, so even though I didn’t see it myself it seems like a reasonably safe call to put it on the recommend list.
It’s basically the bone-dry British funnyman Steve Coogan starring in some kind of smart-ass variation of Karel Reisz’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1982). It’s a film about the making of an historical film — an adaptation of Laurence Stern’s “The Life and Opinions of Tristram Sahndy, Gentlemen” — while at the same time a look at the historical characters as well as the actors portraying them.
Willem Dafoe, Bryce Dallas Howard in Lars von Trier’s Manderlay
After seeing Lars von Trier’s Manderlay in Cannes last May I wrote that “it didn’t do it for me, and I’m speaking as a totally ardent fan of von Trier’s Dogville, Dancer in the Dark and Breaking the Waves, as well as being a general fool for his bad-boy provocations.
“It’s a relentlessly talky, intelligent and provocative film that addresses…well, American racism, certainly, but more generally a do-gooder tendency by American governments to try and shape other societies so they more resemble our own (Iraq, Vietnam, etc.). And it indulges in the usual proddings and agitations that are par for this Danish filmmaker.
“The second installment in von Trier’s America trilogy, Manderlay is a continuation of the adventures of Grace, the gangster’s daughter played by Nicole Kidman in Dogville, the trilogy’s 2003 kickoff, and by Bryce Dallas Howard in the new film.
Sophia Miles, James Franco in Kevin Reynolds’ Tristan and Isolde
“Both films are stagey and pedantically inclined, and shot on what is probably the same massive sound stage with imaginary props and sets. (The third installment will presumably follow suit.)
“Manderlay is too similar to Dogville and not similar enough. Despite its slow pace and too-gradual plot development, Dogville had a surprise revelation (Kidman is the daughter of gangster James Caan, and not his girlfriend, as the film allows us to assume at first) and a shockingly violent finale that expressed von Trier’s negative feelings about what he sees as American tendencies to exploit the less fortunate.
“Manderlay is obviously man to play as a Dogville companion. It is broken up by titled chapters, John Hurt again provides the dry and pungent narration, and the closing credit sequence is nearly identical with the same David Bowie song (‘Young Americans’) played over a series of stills that illuminate the uglier aspects of America’s history — in this instance the treatment of African-Americans over the last century or so.
“But there’s no big jolt or surprise at the finale — you can pretty much tell what’s coming from the get-go — and it so closely recalls Dogville‘s aching-butt aspects that watching it feels like a chore.
Eugene Jarecki discussing Why We Fight at the 2005 Sundance Film Festival
Otherwise…
Annapolis isn’t a precise revisiting of An Officer and a Gentleman but it’s obviously on similar turf with the element of boxing thrown in. Annapolis, boxing…Anapolis, boxing. Better Luck Tomorrow helmer Justin Lin is the director, and I should keep my mouth shut until I see it.
Big Momma’s House 2 can have coitus with itself. Breaking News looks to me like a standard-issue Hong Kong cop thriller, and I’m not vigorous enough to try and figure the real truth of it. Mirage, Nanny McPhee and the IMAX film Roving Mars haven’t yet come into focus.
You don’t have confuse Tristram Shandy with Tristan and Isolde — “Tristram” has two r’s and the movie is fairly jaunty and flip, and the other one is bold-faced sincere.
Grabs
(l. to r.) Occasional Hollywood Elsewhere columnist Dylan Wells, Becca Payne and producer-screenwriter L.M. Kit Carson at Columbia student bar at Broadway and 113th Street — Tuesday, 12.27, 10:15 pm
On IRT Lexington uptown — Saturday, 12.24, 3:10 pm.
Troubador in waiting area for Union Square L line to Brooklyn — Monday, 12.26, 11:25 pm.
$30 jar of ginger orange foam scrub, purchased at Sabon on Spring Street on Sunday, 12.25, 8:40 pm.
Mott Street in Little Italy — Thursday, 12.29, 8:20 pm.
Canal Street near Manhattan Bridge — Thursday, 12.29, 7:15 pm.
Grand Central Station — Tuesday, 12.27, 4:25 pm.
On L train heading to Brooklyn — Tuesday, 1.27, 11:45 pm
What would Nic Cage (or a character played by him), Joan of Arc and Oliver Reed’s “Father Grandier” character in The Devils have in common? Something, I think…unless Neil Labute has decided to re-shuffle the story of The Wicker Man.
Thurday, 12.29, 8:15 pm.
Herzog vs. Huffman
“Thanks for celebrating Werner Herzog, the most amazing director working today. However…
“While I don’t disagree with you and Time‘s Richard Corliss for celebrating his little seen recent, wonderful documentary The White Diamond, I wonder if you were aware just how contrived the film is.
“Recently Herzog was in Seattle for a short festival of some of his recent films and in the q & a session afterwards he explained that pretty much everything said in the interview sessions in the film (particularly from the talkative local man who owned the rooster) was completely scripted.
“Herzog said it in way that made it seem like he would be stunned if anyone could possibly think it was done any other way. He described in detail how he wrote complete speeches for the folks and how they would struggle to deliver them (the speeches are basically based on his conversations with the interviewees and Herzog’s own thoughts).
“If anything, knowing that this is how Herzog constructs his documentaries makes me like them even more. All documentaries are a succession of lies that form a particular person’s greater truth. I am just surprised that Herzog seemed to assume that everyone else was in on the secret.” — Richard Huffman, Seattle, WA.
Werner Herzog replies: “Jeffrey — [Huffman’s] questions about The White Diamond are too simplified. Why would I who postulates a cinema where you can trust your eyes again (Fitzcarraldo) ‘concoct’ elements of his ‘documentaries’?
“My inventions and stylizations aim to penetrate into a deeper truth, whereas Reality TV only pretends to depict the ‘real’ but captures just facts, and not truth.
“I have to be more precise to distinguish between two major issues:
“1. Whenever it comes to visual material, I want audiences to trust their eyes again, like the ship over a mountain (Fitzcarraldo). When I use a digital effect, like at the end of Invincible where the strongman’s kid brother flies away across the ocean: it is so obvious, and so stylized, and embedded in the dialogue that it is no contradiction to what I like to achieve.
“I welcome the recreation of dinosaurs on the screen.
“Equally: everything which constitutes the hardcore identity of a protagonist in my “documentaries” I would not touch (Littlre Dieter Needs to Fly, Grizzlly Man, Wings of Hope, etc.). However, I do invent Dieter’s dreams, and I do stage elements of his character (otherwise not visible), like Dieter opening and closing the door of his home. This is the ecstatic truth of his existence.
“2. Whatever I can do to get beyond the mere facts…to get deeper into a story of a ‘documentary’…to grasp a truth in its ecstatic state, I will do. The story of Graham Dorrington remains untouched, the catastrophy which befell Dieter Plage, the cinematographer, during his maiden flight on board Dorrington’s airship, happened as narrated, yet: I liked a seemingly unimportant side figure, Mark Anthony Jhap so much that I manoeuvred him more and more into the center – or rather epicenter – of the film. The leading character shifts from Dorrington to Mark Anthony, and at the end to Mark Anthony’s splendid rooster.
“The scene where Mark Anthony leads the camera during his foraging trip to the waterfall, watching it through one single drop of water, is completely scripted, and staged, and rehearsed. From off camera I am asking the most insipid New Age question: ‘Mark Anthony, do you see a whole universe in one single drop of water’, and Mark Anthony turns around with a slight smirk on his face, and responds: ‘I cannot hear what you say for the thunder that you are.’ I believe I shot the scene 5 or 6 times until I got the right, almost imperceptible smirk.
“Mark Anthony’s sentence appears verbatim in a previous film,
“What you and your audience also should be aware of is the fact that the drop of water was not water, but glycerin which has better properties for filming. Klaus Scheurich, a very accomplished wildlife cinematographer, shot this drop of ‘water’ with the inverted waterfall caught in it, and this — at first sight — looked like kitsch, but I got hooked to the image, and I was convinced that this waterdrop embedded in an environment of sheer fantasy would assume a different, a higher, an ecstatic quality.
“I think that this delicate line between reality, and fact, and truth needs to be more clearly defined. My Minnesota Declaration (you’ll find it on my website) does this. But what has to be made more clear is: with the onslaught of virtual realities WE HAVE TO RE-DEFINE REALITY: beyond Cinema Verite, beyond the documen- taries we usually see on TV, beyond the terrain which is not solid any longer, as if we were treading on thin ice.” – Werner Herzog
How much of a strong Christian element will there be in Oliver Stone’s 9/11 movie that Paramount is releasing next August, and how much of a Chrisitan angle will be part of the marketing of this film? Andrea Berloff’s script is about the true story of two Port Authority cops, John McLoughlin (Nicolas Cage) and William J. Jimeno (Michael Pena), who were buried under the rubble of the fallen World Trade Center towers on 9.11. It’s been reported that the ex-Marine who drove down to the WTC site from Connecticut and wound up digging the cops out and saving their lives (In The Bedroom‘s William Maptoher is portraying him in the film) was a born-again Christian who he believed he was doing the bidding of a higher celestial power in performing his rescue. But what hasn’t been reported is that a late ’04 draft of Berfloff’s script has a scene in which Jesus Christ appears in a hallucination that Jimeno “sees” as he’s slipping in and out of consciousness due to a lack of water, and Christ offers water to him. This scene could easily have been tossed or not filmed, but if it stays and makes the final cut, Paramount Pictures, distributors of the Stone film, will obviously have marketing hook to try and attract the crowd that supported The Passion of the Christ and are soon expected to turn out big-time for The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe.
A couple more of those films I listed in that earlier “tipped for Sundance” item (the source of which was a Film Finders document) have turned up in the Sundance ’06 Premieres section. Terry Zwigoff’s Art School Confidential and Nicole Holofcener’s Friends with Money, to be precise. Holfocener’s film having been chosen as the festival opener raises red flags. As everyone knows, opening-night Sundance flicks have a historical record of being either a bit soft or lacking in provocation or too emotionally simplistic or even mainstream mushy.
Why is Julia Roberts still “perceived” as the highest-paid actress who pulls down $20 million per film? Back in the days of Notting Hill and Runaway Bride, okay…but now? Isn’t she starting to be over, winding down, etc.? No big movie roles on the horizon, on the mommy track, doing a New York play next March called “Three Days of Rain”, etc.? Roberts’ alleged standing is contained in a special piece by Hollywood Reporter‘s Christy Grosz about the town’s most highly-paid actresses. Nicole Kidman is listed as #2 with a payday in the realm of $16 to $17 million. (Hold up… didn’t I read a few months ago that the triple whammy of Cold Mountain, The Stepford Wives and Bewitched had turned Kidman into a shark jumper?) Reese Witherspoon is said to be the third highest earner with a $15 million fee….okay, deservedly. Next is Drew Barrymore at $15 million (even though her movies almost always stink, because people go to see them anyway…. brilliant). Angelina Jolie and Cameron Diaz are both pulling down $10 to $15 million per project. (Tell that to the Fox execs who met Diaz’s fee for In Her Shoes.) Jodie Foster is earning $10 to $12 mil- lion a pop, Charlize Theron is getting $10 million, and Jennifer Aniston $9 million.
The following films are set for the 2006 Sundance Film Festival, which will run from Thursday, 1.19.06 through Sunday, 1.29.06: (1) Steven Shainberg’s Fur, the Diane Arbus biopic with Nicole Kidman and Robert Downey, Jr., from Picturehouse; (2) Brian DePalma’s The Black Dahlia, a period crime thriller with Josh Hartnett, Scarlett Johanson, Hilary Swank, Aaron Eckhardt; (3) Joby Harold’s Awake, a Weinstein Company thriller with Hayden Christensen, Sigourney Weaver, Jessica Alban; (4) Fabiane Bielinsky’s The Aura, an Argentine film about a taxidermist involved in criminal intrigue; (5) Terry Zwigoff’s Art School Confidential, a sardonic comedy about a young guy (Max Minghella) who enrolls in art school for curious fame-related reasons, with John Malkovich, Anjelica Huston, Jim Broadbent; (6) 0430, a totally non-verbal Singapore-produced film from director-writer Royston Tan, about a friendship between an 11 year-old boy and a man in his 30s; (7) Todd Yellin’s Brother’s Shadow, a Brooklyn-set drama about a black-sheep type (Scott Cohen) trying to step into the shoes of his deceased older sibling; (8) Neil Armfield’s Candy, a Down Under relationship drama with Heath Ledger, Abbie Cornish and Geoffrey Rush; (9) Nanda Anan’s City of Sand and Stone, an adventure piece about an American woman (Kelli Garner) unravelling some sort of mystery in India, with Justin Theroux and Frank Langella; (10) Fast Track, a Weinstein Co. comedy from director Jesse Peretz, with Jason Bateman, Amanda Peet, Paul Rudd and Mia Farrow; (11) Michael Lehmann’s Flakes, a quirky-behavior comedy with Aaron Stanford and Zooey Deschanel; (12) Nicole Holofcener’s Friends With Money, a relationship drama with Jennifer Aniston, Frances McDormand, Scott Caan; (13) Dito Montiel’s A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints, a New York-based drama with Chazz Palmintieri, Rosario Dawon, Robert Downey, Jr., and produced by Downey and Trudie Styler (i.e., Mrs. Sting); (14) Julian Goldberger’s The Hawk is Dying, a Florida-set drama with Paul Giamatti and Michael Pitt; (15) Klimt, about the last years of Austrian artist Gustav Klimt, with John Malkovich, Stephen Dillane and Saphron Burrows; (16) Lee Yoon-Ki’s Love Talk, a Korean-American drama set in Los Angeles; (17) Kevin Smith’s The Passion of the Clerks, with Brian O’Halloran, Jason Mewes, Jeff Anderson and Smith; (18) John Cameron Mitchell’s Shortbus about several New Yorkers “exploring” each other during a power outage; (19) Bruce Leddy’s Shut Up and Sing, a meditative comedy about an a capella singing group having a reunion; (20) Robert Benigni’s The Tiger and the Snow, about a love-struck Italian poet immersed in the American invasion of Iraq; (21) Carlos Borado’s What God Knows, a Brazilian drama with Diego Luna and Alicia Braga; and (22) Hilary Brougher’s Stephanie Daley, a drama about infanticide with Tilda Swinton and Amber Tamblyn. These 22 films are, of course, just the tip of the iceberg.
Cowpoke Surge
It’s time to say it straight (and I don’t mean that as a pun): Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain (Focus Features, 12.9) is the movie to beat in the Best Picture race this year.
I’m not saying it will win or lose, but it’s the one film everyone in the country will be talking about over the next five or six weeks and deciding where they stand deep down. And it’s safe to say that a lot of convictions about this film will go far beyond issues of cinematic criteria.
On the brink of a dishonest marriage: Jake Gyllenhaal, Anne Hathaway in Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain (Focus Features, 12.9)
The bottom line is that Brokeback Mountain is the only year-end prestige film that people are weeping over, and that matters. On top of which it has a simple philoso- phical theme (i.e., ignore the pleadings of your heart at your own peril), which all Best Picture winners tend to have.
This is mostly a gut feeling, but I’ve called around a bit and it’s the one film that seems to be truly gathering steam within L.A. and N.Y. screening circles (except for certain conservative harumphers and macho conquistadors) as an enlightened stand-out.
It’s the classiest tearjerker. The most bravely made. The year’s one big deck-re- shuffler. The stand-alone-under-a-lonely-nightscape movie that did something new and head-turning. A film that brought a sense of real compassion and vulnerability to the table, and is sure to goad anyone who sees it into a deeper understanding of what comprises human tragedy.
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I haven’t conducted any kind of scientific poll, but I’m hearing that Academy mem- bers are saying to each other than Brokeback Mountain is an almost-certain Best Picture nominee, which confirms what I’ve long believed would eventually happen anyway.
But I have to acknowledge something else, however reluctantly, which is that there are people out there who are not on the team and never will be.
Brokeback Mountain is at heart an emotionally shielded and heterosexual-attitude piece about two rugged western guys named Jack Twist (Jake Gyllenhaal) and En- nis del Mar (Heath Ledger) who fall in love with each other in their early 20s and spend the rest of their lives feeling all screwed up about it.
They both get married and have kids and take a stab at conventional domesticity while continuing to get together for “fishing trips” now and then. But the denial fes- ters and eats away. Ledger’s gruff, emotionally plugged-up cowhand is especially unable to act on his feelings for Twist in any lasting way, and all kinds of bad stuff kicks in down the road.
Brokeback Mountain‘s Heath Ledger, Jake Gyllenhaal, Michelle Williams and Anne Hathaway at Toronto Film Festival press conference for the film.
My repeated promises that this film isn’t gay are getting tiresome, but it really and truly isn’t. But those nagging impressions about it being a “gay cowboy” movie aren’t going to go away, and the more recent (and catchy) “gay Gone With the Wind” label is going to stick also.
And I’m afraid…I’ll just spit it out…that homophobia and closet bubba-ism (which is a bigger factor than some of us may realize) are going to start elbowing their way into the Brokeback Mountain conversation over the next several weeks.
I’ve been picking up indications of resistance in letters here and there…just hints and simmerings (following this article is a letter from a 26 year-old Milwaukee guy who’s been picking up a certain vibe when the trailer plays)…but I’m starting to sense there may be more where this comes from.
And I’d be kidding myself if I didn’t admit to the possibility of a subterranean, grumpy-straight-male, anything-but-Brokeback groundswell. If there’s enough heft behind this, there’s a chance that the scales could tip against Lee and producer James Schamus and everyone who loves and supports this film.
The fact that Matt Drudge, a conduit of conservative opinion but also a guy with a very sharp nose for what’s happening in the hinterlands, has run at least two uh-oh items about Brokeback Mountain… this is a significant barometric reading.
Brokeback Mountain director Ang Lee after winning the Golden Lion at last September’s Venice Film Festival
Focus Features wants to take the high road and I understand that, but The Battle of Brokeback Mountain is starting to take shape, and will fundamentlally be about whether people can look beyond their personal agendas and aversions and look into the fundamental truths contained in its story.
The more I consider the competition, the more I’m persuaded that no other film has come close to staking out, much less laying claim to, the emotional turf occupied by Brokeback Mountain.
The issue of whether or not it will gather more support than Steven Spielberg’s Munich, which my ass-teletype and insect-antennae readings keep telling me is going to be received in a couple of weeks’ time as a pretty good film but which has almost no chance of being this year’s Million Dollar Baby, is almost moot at this stage.
How can I say that? What do I know? But just wait.
The older ooh-ahh crowd…the journalists and Academy members who voted or campaigned for Rob Marshall’s Chicago two years ago…seem to be lining up behind Memoirs of a Geisha, and already I can see this emerging as a possible anything-but-Brokeback alternative (although I gag at the thought).
Capote is a sublimely haunted film that gets better every time you re-see it or think back on it. The New World will almost certainly be a compositional stunner (and perhaps more). Crash broke through and found its audience and deserves an industry-wide salute. And The Constant Gardener is thrillingly crafted piece that fuses the emotional and political into a kind of African third-world symphony.
But Brokeback Mountain is the daddy…the one movie with a grip on a profound human truth that we all recognize.
This is what we’re all sitting on…the rumble of mid-November. And the question seems to be whether or not the resistant types out there will summon the char- acter to overcome their macho chortlings about the cornholing-in-the-tent-on-the- fishing-trips, and find the calm and coolness that will allow them to be big-hearted and open-hearted enough to…fuck it…let this film in.
We’re all lonely. We’ve all let chances at happiness slip through our fingers. Life is so damn short it’s not funny. What we feel in our hearts we’d better damn well act upon, or we’ll sure as shit feel the consequences down the road.
Attaboy
Thanks to Buffalo News columnist Greg Connors for giving me and this column a plug in last Monday’s edition.
Milwaukee, Baby
“I’m starting to worry about Brokeback Mountain‘s appeal in Milwaukee and surrounding environs. I live in Milwaukee and we have two Landmark theatres here — the Oriental and the Downer. And the trailer for BBM has been playing for a month or so in front of most films at both theaters, and I’ve seen it about four or five times within that time period.
“Though the audience is pretty typical for an art house/indie theatre, reactions have not been positive. Each time I’ve felt something like confusion, followed by the reali- zation that it’s ‘the gay cowboy movie.’ followed by either snickering or outright laughter. It seems like people don’t know what to make of it.
Landmark’s Oriental theatre in Milwaukee, haven to a group of Brokeback snickerers whose numbers are undetermined.
“I know the people I was at the theatre with snickered. Some had heard of it and some had not. But when they realize that it’s a love story between two cowboys, they laugh…regardless of whether or not they had heard of it.
“Not that I’d know how to sell it any better than Focus has. I hope I’m wrong. I think it looks great and I can’t wait to see it.
“I am 26. I would say that the snickerers in the audiences I’ve seen the trailer with are on the younger side. Maybe younger viewers just aren’t interested in Brokeback Mountain and that’ll be that.” — Paul Doro, Milwaukee, WI.
Another place for chortlers and snickerers to congregate
Young-male aversion to the trailer is mentioned in Sean Smith’s currently-running Newsweek story about Brokeback Mountain.
By way of Smith, producer James Schamus addresses the guys who are laughing at the trailers: ‘If you have a problem with the subject matter, that’s your problem, not mine,’ he says. ‘It would be great if you got over your problem, but I’m not sitting here trying to figure out how to help you with it.’
Smith also reports, “In an early meeting, Schamus told Lee that, from a marketing standpoint, they were making this film for one core audience. ‘Yes, of course,’ Lee said. ‘The gay audience.’ No, Schamus said. ‘Women.'”
Cash It
Editor’s note: I’m re-running the review I ran last September about Walk the Line because it opens tomorrow on Friday, 11.18.]
Walk the Line (20th Century Fox, 11.18) is a frank, straight-from the-shoulder bio- pic about the late Johnny Cash, and I’m cool with it and admire 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 touch- ing the bottom of the pool.
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, hurtin’ feelings, etc.
Walk the Line costars Joaquin Phoenix (as Johnny Cash) and Reese Witherspoon (as June Carter)
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.
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.
At the same time 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 last summer, 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.
Wham Bam
Cinderella Man re-opens this Friday in a bid to get people to reconsider it for Oscar nomination, and maybe to make a bit more money. The most honest thing I can do is to re-print what I wrote late last May, the morning after seeing it at the AMC Empire on 42nd Street:
It isn’t quite stupendous, but Cinderella Man is honest and earnest and has dignity and heart, and if you don’t respond to it on some deep-down human level there’s probably something you should have inside that’s not there.
It’s easily the best, most emotionally rewarding mainstream flick of the year so far, and that’s not a left-handed way of saying it’s the best application of traditional thematic uplift…although it is that, I suppose.
Russell Crowe as the legendary Jim Braddock, Paul Giamatti as his manager Joe Gould in Ron Howard’s Cinderella Man.
Like Seabiscuit, Cinderella Man is a 1930s Depression saga about a sports figure — an Irish boxer named James Braddock (Russell Crowe) — who was up and flush in the late 20s and then down after the 1929 crash and then fighting badly and presumed to be over…like a lot of people were assuming about themselves and even the country as a whole.
But then Braddock lucked into another chance and made good on it big-time by taking the heavyweight championship title from the formidable Max Baer, who had killed a guy in the ring and maybe another one besides (a delayed response thing), and in so doing struck a chord with working people struggling to make do in that horrible period.
The mythological similarities aside, Cinderella Man has been crafted by director Ron Howard with a good deal more poignancy and grace and laid-back confidence than Gary Ross was able to summon for Seabiscuit.
And Crowe can act circles around the horses who played Seabiscuit, and looks an awful lot like the real Jim Braddock…as far as his weight loss and genetic inheritance and the first-rate makeup allow for, I mean.
Cinderella Man also has the absolutely genius-level Paul Giamatti, who got a round of applause during the closing credits at last night’s all-media screening at Manhattan’s AMC Empire 25.
Let’s say it right here and now — Giamatti is a guaranteed lock for a Best Supporting Actor nomination next year.
It’s way too early to even think about making blanket calls about winners, but given the fact that everyone knows that Giamatti has been burned twice — last year when he wasn’t nominated for Best Actor for Sideways and the year before when the Academy ignored his American Splendor performance — he’s looking like a very heavily favored guy at this stage.
Every movie that connects with audiences says something that everyone including your grandfather recognizes as honest and true. The message of Cinderella Man, simply put, is that there’s nothing like getting heavily and repeatedly kicked in the ass (like having to deal with hopelessness and soup kitchens and bread lines, having no job, being unable to pay the electricity bill, seeing your kids go hungry) to give your life a certain focus.
What did I love about Cinderella Man the most, apart from the story and production designer Wynn Thomas’s convincing `30s milieu and Salvatore Totino’s cinematography and the pitchperfect performances? The fact that Howard hangs back for the most part and doesn’t push the emotional buttons too strongly.
I love that after an establishing prologue of six or seven minutes Howard takes things into a downer struggling mode and keeps them there for a full 45 minutes.
And then when the turnaround stuff finally starts to happen he doesn’t lather it and try and beat you up with it. We know that the story is a classic come-from-behind uplifter and this is why Howard is making the film, etc., but it doesn’t feel as if he’s hustling you. He’s telling a true story, after all, and holding back for the most part and just letting it come together on its own terms.
Okay, he throws in some inspirational Irish music here and there and gives us a few Ron Howard-y touches here and there, but not so you’d really notice.
Over the last few years, and particularly since he got into his 50s, Ron Howard has been getting better and better. A Beautiful Mind, The Missing (an undervalued, tough-as-nails western) and now this…perhaps the best film of his life.
Cinderella Man is longish (two hours and 20 minutes), but it doesn’t feel that way because the attention paid to this and that detail in the early sections totally pays off in the third act. Congratulations to Howard, his partner/producer Brian Grazer, and screenwriters Cliff Hollingsworth and Akiva Goldsman (A Beautiful Mind ) for deciding to let the story takes its time and in so doing imparts a certain confidence.
The climax of the down period comes when the destitute Braddock, desperate to get the power in his family’s cold-water flat turned back on, goes to a bar to beg change from his former cronies and supporters in the boxing game. It’s a painful scene, but it’s real and believable and penetrating as hell.
The five or six fight sequences are exciting and beautifully cut, and I didn’t care if they were as original as Scorsese’s Raging Bull sequences appeared back in `80.
The real Jim Braddock (left) and Max Baer, in snaps taken sometime around 1934 or ’35 or thereabouts.
The big climax, which lasts about 25 or 26 minutes, depicts, of course, Braddock’s fight against the heavyweight champion Max Baer (Craig Bierko). I knew who the winner would be, obviously, but it didn’t matter because the film is so well shot and edited, blah, blah.
Crowe’s performance is an absolute home run. As Braddock’s wife Mae, Renee Zellweger gives her least tedious and off-putting performance since Jerry Maguire. (She almost made me forget about the last Bridget Jones film.)
Bierko’s Baer is a trip and a half. I loved his wild-ass expressions and goofing off in the ring, and how he flips this over in an instant and turns into a beast out for blood.
I loved Bruce McGill’s hard-nosed fight promoter character. McGill nails it every time (Collateral, Matchstick Men, The Insider) and has become one of most dependable character actors around, bar none.
I even found a place in my heart for Paddy Considine’s friend-of-Jim-Braddock character…a political activist-slash-working man….and that’s saying something given my lingering feelings about that “fee-fi-fo-fum” scene in Jim Sheridan’s In America.
War of the Wires
“The question about whether Paramount Home Video should have erased the wires in the just-out DVD of George Pal and Byron Haskin’s War of the Worlds should be simple, but it has somehow become more complex.
“The basis of any serious film restoration is now, and has always been, reference to the original. Not the original negative — the original print.
“With any production, not even specifically special-effects films, the film’s creators had a knowledge of what the shot footage would yield on a final print. Costumes, sets, make-up and special effects devices were all based upon that specific knowledge.
“The problems began in the late 1980s, when Kodak’s newest mastering
and print release stocks for both B & W as well as color emulsions were produced with a much finer grain structure. And make no mistake — that was a good thing.
“It began to combine in the ’90s with newer film-to-tape transfer technologies which enabled a higher resolved record of the film image.
“We saw the earliest problems on what were beautifully rendered laser discs of the Chaplin classics from Image Entertainment. The best people were brought in to go through the elements and oversee the work.
“But here’s where it gets difficult. One might make the assumption that access to an original fine grain master of, let’s say, City Lights or The Circus would be a great thing. And it was.
“But Chaplin had taken that master, and from it created a dupe printing negative from which final release prints would have been struck.
“Chaplin, a master filmmaker, knew precisely what affect optics and grain structure would have on his final product.
“Take away one generation and suddenly we see production artifacts like wires.
“This same thing occurred with 70mm prints of 2001: A opace Odyssey struck on the newer stocks. Because of the higher resolution, the glass holding the revolving pen on the spaceship heading to Clavius could now be easily seen in theatrical projection.
“Although I haven’t seen an original dye transfer print of WotW in decades, I can tell you that the system worked as follows.
“In 1953 Technicolor was using optics which are nowhere near the resolution of today’s scanning devices. This softened the image, yielding a more pleasant, less grainy look to the film.
“The mordant which allowed the liquid dyes to adhere to the blank stock was also slightly different than used later, and allowed a very slight softening of the grain structure.
“The final look of the print was achieved by the optics used in the creation of the printing matrices, the mordant, and the liquid dyes. The image looked perfect and brilliant on screen because of the slightly higher contrast of the Technicolor system which created a higher perceived sharpness — not actual sharpness.
“Taking those three-strip elements today and negating everything that came between them and the final print can yield a final result which is of overall higher resolution than the original prints. Hence the quandary, and there are two camps.
“My belief is that anything that breaks the suspension-of-disbelief
between the film and the audience should be altered to look as it
did, but now within an overall image of higher resolution.
“So personally I would remove the wires, as I would remove bad matte lines which can make early effects laughable and stop a film in its tracks, making it look like an antique.” — Robert Harris, the producer-scholar who supervised the legendary photo-chemical restorations of Lawrence of Arabia, Vertigo, Spartacus, Rear Window, etc.
Fatigue Guy
“During my prior life as a Merrill Lynch stock analyst, I was quoted as saying this about Harry Potter fatigue. In the fifth paragraph from the bottom, I mean.
“And I was kind of right — each successive film has done less box office than the previous, but of course the books are still boffo.” — Dave Lichtman
The recently-issued Paramount Home Video DVD of the 1953 War of the Worlds, one of the most beautifully photographed Technicolor movies ever made, looks absolutely breathtaking. This sci-fi classic provides one of the lushest color-baths in Hollywood history and has always looked sumptuous…now it’s heavenly.
But there’s an unfortunate side effect to this clarity. The new DVD (released on 11.1) pretty much ruins the suspension-of-disbelief element because of the way- too-visible wires holding up the Martian spaceships. You can see them repeatedly during scenes of the initial assault against the military…a thicket of blue-tinted wires holding up each one.
You can see the wires in this photo (taken off my own TV) but if you have any kind of recently-manufactured big-ass flat screen, they look much more vivid than indicated here
And there’s no believing it. The wires are much too vivid. Clayton Forrester (Gene Barry) is explaining to General Mann (Les Tremayne) how the Martians keep their bright green ships aloft, that they’re using “some form of electro magnetic force” and “balancing the two poles” and so on, and it’s absurd. The illusion is shot.
The obvious solution is for Paramount Home Video to digitally erase the wires. It would make perfect symmetrical sense. Just as digital technology has made this 1953 film look sharper than ever before, it follows that digital technology needs to recreate the original illusion. The wires weren’t that visible 52 years ago, and they weren’t as visible in Paramount Home Video’s 1999 DVD.
I can’t believe there are people who feel that wire-erasing would be a violation of the original film and are actually arguing against a fix-up, but they’re out there.
One of those naysayers is the highly respected and very bright Glenn Erickson (a.k.a., “DVD Savant”). I’m stunned that a smart guy like Erickson could be so dead friggin’ blind.
“Many scenes [in War of the Worlds] that appeared blurry or poorly composited [before] are now crystal clear,” Erickson said in a review posted 13 days ago. “This means that the forest of fine wires supporting the fighting machines is now more visible than ever, so we can’t have everything.
“There was no CG wire removal in 1953,” he writes, “and it would be detrimental revisionism to change the picture now. Today’s enlightened filmmakers like George Lucas would never do such a thing! So be an adult and learn to live with it.”
Uh-huh. Suppose George Pal and Bryon Haskin couldn’t do anything to hide the wires in their film, and 1953 audiences could therefore see them as clearly as DVD watchers can now? Would Pal and Baskin have just shrugged and told Paramount and the exhibitors, “Sorry, guys… learn to live with it…it’s the best we can do”?
Obviously the new DVD is the provider of “detrimental revisionism” — it’s showing an image that wasn’t meant to be seen.
Obviously, clearly…hello?…erasing the wires will enable audiences of today to suspend their disblief with the same ease that audiences did 52 years ago. You can’t muddy up the image so they can’t be seen, so it’s the only thing to do.
I’m going to be charitable and consider the possibility that Erickson may be over- worked and wasn’t thinking all that clearly when he wrote what he wrote. All is forgiven if he recants.
John Lowry, the head of Lowry Digital who’s done some great clean-up and/or digital restoration work on loads of classic films, was the one hired by Paramount Home Video to clean up War of the Worlds .
Ann Robinson, Gene Barry in War of the Worlds
“Our job is always to serve the wishes of the client…we do what the client says …and we didn’t have orders to clean up the wires,” he says. “Plus we were working on a very tight budget.”
Lowry faced a similar issue when he was doing the digital remastering ofAlfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest. “We were working onthe scene when the crop duster plane crashes into the gas truck,” he recalls, “and there were 25 or 30 frames of that particular shot in which you could see three wires holding up the rather large model of the airplane.
“And I said to myself, my God, too obvious…it spoils the illusion. And I asked myself, what would Hitchcock do? I knew what he would do. Take the wires out of there. So I did, and the Warner Bros. people approved.
“But ever since then we’ve been very attuned to original artistic intent. And with today’s technology, anything that interferes with the story-telling process or which degrades that process, is dead wrong.
“We got rid of the wires on the Mary Poppins DVD, for the Disney people. We asked and they said ‘get rid of them’ but they had the money to do it.
“When we were working on the snake-pit scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark you could see all kinds of reflections in the glass separating Ford from the snakes, and there was a very conscious decision made by Spielberg to take the reflections out.”
I called and e-mailed a few other guys who should have opinions about this story — restoration master Robert Harris, director and War of the Worlds fan Joe Dante (who riffs about the film on one of the DVD’s two audio tracks), and film restoration artist Mike Arick.
I’ll probably add to this story on Monday if any of these guys reply.
Grabs
George Clooney, New York Times editor-writer Lynn Hirschberg during a discussion at theatre #10 in Hollywood’s Arclight theatre complex — Saturday, 11.12.05, 4:35 pm. One piece of news that emerged is that Clooney is looking to direct a film currently being written by Joel and Ethan Coen called Suburbacon. Another is that he’ll direct but won’t act in the upcoming televised re-do of Network. He said it took him only about a month to gain 35 pounds for his role in Syriana. I told him I’d been told prior to seeing it by a critic friend that “Fat Clooney is one of the best [performances] that you’ll see this year”…and he was right.
Sunset Blvd. near Cole, looking east — Saturday, 11.12.05, 2:10 pm.
Pico Blvd. and La Brea Avenue, looking south — Saturday, 11.12.05, 6:40 pm.
In front of Arclight Dome theatre — Saturday, 11.12, 2:05 pm
Looking down on the Arclight lobby — Saturday, 11.12, 3:25 pm
Bring It On
Shoot any kind of outdoor footage of the Middle East (especially in Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, et. al.) and you get the same flat terrain…aflame, parched, bleachy…which makes for a kind of atmospheric monotony.
But movies shot there (or which happen there) don’t have to be dull. The Middle East is the dramatic boiling pot of our times. It’s just a matter of going there and absorbing the particulars and pruning them down into something fitting and well- sprung.
U.S. soldier involved in fighting in Falujah in ’04
I’ve recently seen a no-pulse, no-conflict, Waiting-for-Godot Middle East film (Sam Mendes’ Jarhead) and a complex, multi-layered, altogether fascinating one about the pernicious social and political political effects of big oil (Stephen Gaghan’s Syriana)…and leapin’ lizards, talk about a night-and-day response.
I’ll be waiting until 11.23 before running a Syriana review, but it’s obviously a far better film.
Jarhead was so bad and so nothing that it would feel almost refreshing to see a real Middle East war movie — a half-real, half- fictional narrative about the current conflict in Iraq, say. And why not? It’s time.
Hollywood didn’t feel safe about making Vietnam movies until 1978, and the first major Gulf War movie — David O. Russell’s Three Kings — didn’t happen until ’99, or about eight years after the fact. But the concepts of lag-time and the usual “gee, can we get into this?” no longer apply.
The reality of instant digital commnunications means that dramas (or black come- dies) about current military conflicts need to be shot and rescrambled with some urgency. Waiting around won’t do. Immediacy may not be the whole game, but it matters as much as anything else.
Syriana, which Gaghan researched in the Middle East for a full year, is a geo-political spellbinder that doesn’t feel the least bit dated. The story could have happened last summer, or even a year or two from now.
Matt Damon (center) in Stephen Gaghan’s Syriana (Warner Bros, 11.23)
Steven Bochco’s Over There, the first dramatic TV series about an ongoing war, much less one about U.S. troops in Iraq, had its debut on FX last summer. And Hany Abu-Assad’s Paradise Now, a respected film about a couple of would-be Palestinian martyrs, has a ripped-from-right-now quality.
Why not an Iraq War feature right now? Write it, shoot it…sort it out as you go along.
A writer-director of some vision and gumption needs to visit Iraq, get imbedded with the grunts like Gunner Palace‘s Michael Tucker did, soak it up, write it down, find the funding and make a feature film about what’s eally happening in that hell-hole.
Shoot the atmospheric stuff right there, maybe bring some of the cast over…risk it, dodge the bullets, burrow in. And then wrap it, cut it and open it quickly.
If Oliver Stone was the Oliver Stone of the mid to late ’80s, he’d be the guy to do this.
If Italian actor-filmmaker Roberto Benigni (who won a Best Actor and Best Foreign Film Oscar for Life Is Beautiful) can make an Iraqi War film, why can’t Americans?
Benigni just opened a comedy set against the backdrop of the Iraq conflict, althou- gh it was shot in Tunisia. An admired film (if not quite the anti-American rant some of his Italian fans had expected), The Tiger and the Snow opened on 10.14 in Italy and will debut in France in mid-December and probably open here during the first six months of ’06.
Syriana uncertainty: George Clooney’s CIA agent between a rock and hard place
A U.S.-produced drama about the current conflict obviously wouldn’t have to be shot in the streets of Baghdad or Fallujah.
A satisfying film for me would probably have to be something like Syriana or Traffic — a multi-character, five or six-plot-thread piece. I’m not going to try and dream up a story here and now, but it would either need to be a Costa Gavras-type condem- nation piece, or one that shows balanced compassion for U.S. troops as well as Iraqi locals.
Has anyone out there written a script or heard of a good one making the rounds? Is there a military veteran, freelance journalist and/or contract engineer who’s been to Iraq within the last couple of years who’s published stories or recollections on a site that could be made into a good script?
If there’s anything really good that’s been put into script form, or if anyone’s heard of something exceptional making the rounds, please advise.
Aniston Martin
Derailed has been handed a Rotten Tomatoes death sentence — only 19% of the critics approve. But it’s only somewhat bad because of certain hard-to-swallow developments that I won’t divulge. And it’s been well directed by Mikael Halfstrom, and by that I mean it feels solid, assured, nicely shot and well-cut.
Thrillers of this sort often get trashed by critics but supported by paying audiences. An agent told me this morning that Derailed, which opened today, has been doing well in New York theatres.
Like Fatal Attraction and Unfaithful, Derailed is a cautionary thriller about what happens when you cheat on your spouse.
Jennifer Aniston in Mikael Halfstrom’s Derailed
Clive Owen plays a Chicago advertising guy who succumbs to temptation after meeting Jennifer Aniston, a blue-chip financial consultant, on a commuter train. But then they get robbed and assaulted by Vincent Cassel in a seedy hotel room before they get down to it…
I’m not going any further, but Cassel basically becomes Bruno Antony to Owen’s Guy Haines (the two leads in Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train), and I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t caught up in all the lever-pulling. It’s far from first-rate, but it’s reasonably decent.
The biggest problem is one that nobody seems to have written about so far, which is the casting of Jennifer Aniston as an adulterer who… well, as a woman who can’t be trusted.
As far as I’m concerned, the believabilty of Aniston as a conniving adultress is about the same as a hypothetical casting of Dean Martin as one of Christ’s disciples in George Stevens’ The Greatest Story Ever Told.
Aniston was a TV actress who deserved a fair shake when she played a cheating housewife in The Good Girl, but she’s since become a tabloid superstar — she’s known worldwide as the nice, emotionally temperate actresss who had her heart broken by Brad Pitt.
Dean Martin
Whatever the real truth and whomever she may actually be, Aniston is the good wife who got fucked over. It’s hard, but the public persona of some actors and actresses is so deeply imbedded that they can’t be absorbed into in certain roles..period.
Frank Sinatra as a priest in The Miracle of the Bells…get outta town.
Or John Wayne as Genghis Khan or, much worse, as a Roman Centurion standing at the foot of the cross while Jesus is dying in The Greatest Story Ever Told and saying, “This was truly the son of God.”
There must be dozens of other head-slappers. Send ’em in, please.
Ten Years and Two Weeks
I’m a Terrence Malick fanatic from way back, and it’s the nostalgia factor more than anything else that has me especially excited about seeing The New World (New Line, 12.25), which Malick wrote and directed.
I’m also one of the only journalists to have any kind of conversation with Malick since he went into his Thomas Pynchon withdrawal about 17 years ago (right after the release of Days of Heaven) and became this gentle phantom-like figure whom journalists couldn’t get to under any circumstance.
In this context speaking to Malick on the phone– which I managed to do on Octo- ber 25, 1995, around 11:35 am — was like snapping a photo of Bigfoot. It was a half-pleasant, half-awkward, quite meaningless conversation, but at least he picked up the phone.
Terrence Malick during filming of The Thin Red Line
Malick had been staying with producer Mike Medavoy, who wound up producing The Thin Red Line, but Medavoy was leaving for Shanghai and Malick would be staying elsewhere, so I called to get a forwarding number.
A cleaning woman answered and said Medavoy was out, but that Malick was nearby. She asked me to hold…
Malick: Hi.
Me: Hi, Terry. This is Jeffrey Wells speaking…
Malick: Hi.
Me: And uhh…I was just talking to Mike last night and he said, uh, you might be leaving today and I wanted to see if I could speak with you about an article I’m researching. It’s for Los Angeles magazine and my editor…he worked on that piece about ten years ago with David Handleman for California magazine. It was called “Absence of Malick.”
Malick: Yeah.
Me: I don’t know if…did you happen to read it?
Malick: No, I…I…uhnn…
Me: Anyway, I’m doing this piece and trying to sort things through here. About what’s going on with…well, to start with, The Thin Red Line and that rumored BAM stage production of “Sansho the Bailiff” and…I’ve wanted to speak with you about it, and now that I’m speaking with you I feel…well, I feel nervous.
Locust arrival scene in Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven
Malick: Don’t be, Jeffrey. It’s not that. I just don’t feel comfortable talking about it yet.
Me: About Red Line, you mean?
Malick: Yeah and…it’s something that has no date, really. It may happen some- time in the indefinite future.
Me: The indefinite future? Uh-huh. So there’s no approximate, long-range plan at all? It’s not even on a low flame?
Malick: I…I’m…uhmm.
Me: I was only thinking, you know…heh-heh… ‘indefinite future.’ You could say the same thing about the sun collapsing and the end of the solar system, heh-heh.
Malick: Uhhmm…
Me: I’m only mentioning this because…well, you may have seen that item in Pre- miere that you said you had this reading of the script with Costner and Lucas Haas and Ethan Hawke.
Malick: We did it just to get a sense of how it flowed.
Me: How did it flow?
Malick: I just don’t feel comfortable talking about it. I appreciate your interest but…
Malick in 1979
Malick: Mike says you’re on the second or third draft, something…it’s a work that’s been through some development and progression, and…
Malick: I….
Malick: I dont want to grill you, Terry. Mike explained the rules and said that grilling you…’that’s the one thing we don’t do’…and I understand that. I had a hope, though, of just discussing movies in general…ones you’ve seen and been impressed by in recent years.
Malick: Well, I appreciate your interest. I guess I do feel uncomfortable talking right now.
Me: I’m just one of…who knows, hundreds of film journalists around the country who regard you as one of the best ever and have watched your films over and over.
Malick: You’re very kind, Jeffrey. I appreciate it and I feel it and it comes to me as very encouraging. But I feel uncomfortable talking about it. I spoke to my brother Chris and he said that you’re just trying to help. And of course I know you’re just trying to do your job.
Me: I was actually just reading about a new laser disc of Days of Heaven that’s coming out, and it’s really something I’m looking forward to because I’ve never seen a print of that film that equalled the first viewing at the Cinema 1 in New York when they showed a 70mm print with six-channel sound, and having a…are you a laser-disc aficionado?
Malick: I’m, uh…not..uh…
Me: Are you…you don’t watch TV? Videos? Do you ever catch movies on tape?
Malick: I’d be happy to talk to you at some later point, Jeffrey.
Me: I know. I understand know what the rules are.
Malick: And someone actually is here, Jeffrey, and I do have to keep an appointment. I would love to, later on…we could talk.
Me: I’ll look forward to it. I understand you’re in town for a few more days.
Malick: Yes, but I really do have to go now.
Me: Because if you have a moment later on, I’d like to run some basic points by you and just go over them one by one, for accuracy’s sake.
Me: I can’t really talk about this. I know what you’re trying to do and it’s not…if you’d try to understand. Chris told me you’d written and that you were trying to help.
Me: Well, I hope you have a good stay. I look forward to chatting again on a more…uhm, relaxed basis.
Malick: Okay, thank you.
DVD distributors re-issue classic titles so often, each time claiming that the film has been beautifully remastered and made to look much better than before…that after a while the pitches don’t register. The marketing of Warner Home Video’s brand-new The Wizard of Oz DVD packages (both a two-disc and three-disc set, out 10.25) on the WHV website promises the same-old “dazzlingly restored picture”…but this time (and I can feel the skepticism before even saying this) it really is exceptional and the best-looking-ever because of a process called “edge detection.” The WHV marketers are figuring there’s no point in trying to reach average-Joe DVD buyers with technical particulars, but this new Oz is in the same class as those relatively recent WHV DVD’s of Gone With the Wind, Meet Me in St. Louis and Singin’ in the Rain. A special software program (called “Ultra resolution” on the disc’s Amazon page) that re-registers and re-aligns Oz‘s three-strip Technicolor separations brings all kinds of new details and textures to the eye. It does more than restore Oz to its former glory, blah, blah…it presents a degree of radiant color and needle-sharp definition than was ever visible in the celluloid versions. Fred Kaplan wrote an excellent explanation piece about the edge detection process on Slate last February.
Not Bali Hai
Steve James’ Reel Paradise is lying in wait at your local theatre like a King Cobra. Buy a ticket and watch it and it will bite you and poison to death any Marlon Brando Mutiny on the Bounty South Sea island fantasies you may be nurturing.
Paradise says that watching a good movie can create a kind of paradise in your head, and that turning people on to an exciting or nourishing film can be a wonderful thing. It also says that an alleged tropical getaway like Fiji (and, by extension, other South Sea locations) can be vaguely boring and economically strapped with low-rent thieves ready to sneak in and steal your computer if you’re not careful.
The Pierson family (l. to r.): Georgia, John, Janet, Wyatt in Steve James’ Reel Paradise
And you’d better watch out for your teenaged daughter while you’re there also because life is a struggle and a pain everywhere, and nothing about South Sea life is particularly safe or comforting or tranquil. In short, there are no getaway places. Your life is your life and that’s that.
I don’t know why I used the image of a King Cobra to describe this film. It’s more of a mongoose, really. A thoughtful, life-can-be-gnarly-but-whaddaya-gonna-do? movie made by folks I happen to know and like and respect.
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I guess all I’m really saying is that I don’t think I’ll be visiting Fiji during my next South Seas vacation, but if you’re looking to spend your movie money this weekend on something more layered than Judd Apatow’s The 40 Year-Old Virgin, here’s a way to go.
It’s a doc about what happened three years ago to John Pierson — the former “Split Screen” host, movie-book author (“Spike, Mike, Slackers & Dykes”), producer’s rep and all-around movie community good guy — during a year-long stay in Taveuni, Fiji, where he and his family showed free movies to the locals at a place called the Meridian 180.
Pierson discovered this funky, barn-like theatre on a visit to Tavenui — an agricultural island of about 10,000 residents — in 1999. When the Meridian shut down in ’02 Pierson somehow managed to buy it and then talk his family — wife Janet, 16-year-old daughter Georgia and 13-year-old son Wyatt — into making the trek.
John Pierson addressing crowd at Taveuni’s Meridian cinema prior to another night’s showing.
And then James showed up with his camera in the summer of ’03 to document the final month of their stay. And what he got is that life without cultural resources or the usual modern-age distractions can be a bit flat. Taveuni is a poor island with no public electricity, no high-end restaurants, no video rental stores…Nothingville.
But the film also shows that good movies can have a kind of religious effect upon the locals, and that Pierson became, during his stay, a kind of parish priest.
Gut-level movies — comedies, thrillers — fared the best here. The Fiji folks haven’t had much education and are fairly low-rent in their tastes. They want to laugh or be thrilled or be scared. You get the idea that even if prints of, say, films by Robert Bresson were available to Pierson in Fiji, he wouldn’t have dreamt of showing them.
The obvious association is the scene in Preston Sturges’ Sullivan’s Travels when the chain-gang prisoners start laughing uproariously at a Pluto cartoon. A good laugh is all some people have, etc.
The biggest real-life issue in the film is computer robbery and the suspicions that arise about which local might be the culprit. Plus the projectionist Pierson has hired is a real slacker. And there’s also Georgia’s involvement with a local kid whom her parents have reason to disapprove of.
Georgia Pierson (l.) and friend in Reel Paradise.
Put aside the movie-religion aspects and Reel Paradise boils down to a series of lessons about what a real downmarket tobacco-road place Taveuni is, a laid-back culture without much to attract people like myself.
Variety critic Todd McCarthy says Reel Paradise is analogous in some ways to Peter Weir’s The Mosquito Coast. As I watched it I was thinking more about Franklin J. Schaffner’s Papillon.
My mind was also drifting back to that speech that Kirk Douglas gives in Ace in the Hole about the four spindly trees in front of Rockefeller Center providing more than enough in the way of nature’s splendor, etc.
Being There
Almost no one paid to see The Great Raid when it opened last weekend, and most of the critics were bored by it. (It only got a 36% favorable on Rotten Tomatoes.) I wasn’t exactly over-the-moon about it myself, but at no time did it anger or frustrate me, and there’s a kind of distinction in that.
The one aspect that got me 100% was the decision on the part of director John Dahl to make an anachronistic war film. The Great Raid isn’t boring, exactly – it’s just a movie that’s true to the era it’s depicting, and therefore feels out of synch with our times. Which, of course, is partly the point.
The Great Raid is a 98% true World War II story, and not just in factual terms. It’s the story of a raid in early 1945 by a commando team of about 100 soldiers and volunteers, led by some U.S. Army noncoms, upon a Japanese prison camp in the Philippine boonies. It led to the freeing of just over 500 prisoners, soldiers who might have died at the hands of their captors if the raid hadn’t happened.
Benjamin Bratt, James Franco in John Dahl’s The Great Raid.
You can say, “Yeah, and so what?” But this is what the movie’s about, and Dahl has not only paid respect to the story but the era when it happened.
Is The Great Raid the most suspenseful, excitingly paced war film anyone’s ever seen? Obviously not or it wouldn’t have died last weekend. It’s not exactly sluggish but it feels…dutiful. A movie “doing its duty” in trying to recreate a bygone era by adopting an anachronistic style.
And in this sense, Raid‘s stolid qualities — the feeling that it might be your grandfather’s idea of a satisfying World War II film — work in its favor. Not in its commercial favor, obviously, but Dahl did what he did for the right time-machine reasons.
It isn’t just that Dahl has heaped on period realism in terms of dialogue, character shadings and carefully-chosen props and wardrobe (guns, uniforms, women’s hair styles…all highly authentic and just so). It’s also the stolid framing and the unhurried old-fashioned pacing of the thing. It’s Dahl saying to us and himself, “To hell with 21st Century action movie appetites and standards…we are not playing that game.”
The only here-and-now aspect is the faded, sepia-like color…but even the desaturation seems to line up with the old-fogeyness of the thing. It opens the door to an imagining that an original version might have been shot in vivid Technicolor but then faded over the years.
Day-for-night still from The Great Raid, meaning this scene looks a lot duskier in the actual film.
The Great Raid doesn’t feel as if it was shot in ’45 and then put in a storage facility and kept there for 60 years. It would have had to have been filmed in monochrome in a 1.33 to 1 aspect ratio to achieve that illusion. But it does feel like it could have been made in 1955 or thereabouts. If this had actually happened it would have costarred Aldo Ray, Jeff Chandler and George Nader.
As is, the performances (by Benjamin Bratt, James Franco, Joseph Fiennes, Connie Nielsen, Marton Csokas) feel like earnest imitations of the kind of acting that Bill Holden or Jeffrey Hunter or June Allyson used to deliver in boilerplate war flicks of the 1950s.
And I admire the exacting ways that Dahl made it feel so old-fashioned. He knew there would be critics saying “too slow” or whatever, but he was too hard-core to spritz it up (like some period films I’ve seen) and make it feel, say, like a film that was half ’45 and half ’05.
I could go on and on about period films that got the haircuts wrong or had performances or dialogue that felt wrong. It’s not rampant but it happens. Period films are sometimes over-decorated or over-polished. The cars are too new or the actors are too present-day in their speech patterns or accents, or there’s too much CGI (like in Troy).
Marton Csokas in The Great Raid
You can argue that the verisimilitude in The Great Raid doesn’t matter that much because the story plods along and there’s not enough in the way of suspense or story tension, and I wouldn’t argue with you. But I didn’t mind it too much because the period immersion is so complete.
And I just had to slap myself to keep from nodding out. I am boring myself as I finish a piece about a movie that’s a little bit boring for the right creative reasons.
Honest footnote: I have to admit that I was glad when the Japanese soldiers dragged Csokas (the lover in Paramount Classics’ Asylum) and shot him in the head. Csokas speaks with an oddball accent in the film hat includes a bizarre throaty sound he gives to vowels, and so I was glad to rid of him.
By The Way…
Another movie that gets it right in a historical atmosphere sense is George Clooney’s Good Night and Good Luck, which I saw the other night.
It’s not just that the factual newsroom tale, which happened in 1954, has been shot in black and white, but that it feels like one of those live high-quality 1950s television plays, which were routinely seen on Kraft Television Theatre (ABC, 1953-55), Four Star Playhouse (CBS, 1952-56), Ford Theater (NBC, 1952-56) and so on.
David Straitharn in Good Night, and Good Luck
My immediate response was that I really liked and admired the austerity and the realism of Good Night, and Good Luck. It felt like it was happening in the actual 1954…almost. It didn’t feel like ’54 by way of 2005…and I liked that it got right down to the matters at hand and stayed with them.
It really is terrific when you feel a filmmaker striving as hard as Clooney, who costars as well as directs, to give a sense of time and place and also the mentality that informed an era…the way it most likely felt.
I probably won’t get into the merits of Good Night, and Good Luck until it shows at the New York Film Festival in late September (Warner Independent is opening it on October 7), but it’s a thoughtful, respectable film with first-rate acting and an honorable theme and a terrific performance by David Straitharn as legendary newsman Edward R. Murrow.
Honor of Lying
From a celebrity’s perspective, truth-telling is a selective process these days. That’s a way of saying that pretty much every celebrity lies right through his or teeth when it comes to public statements. But it’s okay because they’re well motivated.
They’re lying because they despise the media and feel that dealing with a corrupt and disreputable entity means all bets are off. And I think I understand the ethical system they’re embracing because it was explained in a couple of respected ’60s westerns.
Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch is one of them. I’m thinking of a scene in which William Holden’s Pike Bishop expresses moral support for Robert Ryan’s Deke Thornton because he gave his “word” to a bunch of “damned railroad men,” and Ernest Borgnine’s Dutch Engstrom defiantly argues, “That ain’t what counts! It’s who you give it to.”
Director Sam Peckinpah, star William Holden on the set of The Wild Bunch
Burt Lancaster says the same thing in The Professionals when he discusses flexible ethics with Lee Marvin. When Marvin reminds Lancaster that he’s given his “word” to Ralph Bellamy’s J.W. Grant, a millionaire railroad tycoon, Lancaster replies, “My word to Grant ain’t worth a plug nickel.”
Tom Cruise is J.W. Grant-ing, in effect, when he says he’s in love with Katie Holmes and wants to marry her and so on. He’s saying, “This is what you’re going to get from me and if you don’t think I’m being honest then that’s too fucking bad because my life is my own and you guys don’t rate the real truth because you’re scumbags and you pass along tabloid fairy tales.”
Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie lied and lied and lied and lied (and told their publicists to lie and lie and lie and lie) about their relationship, and they felt just totally fine about it because their word to the tabloid press is commensurate with the degree of respect they have for it.
I don’t really believe this, but I like to tell myself that Bill Clinton lied about his history with Monica Lewinsky because he felt that the news media (and the Republicans pushing things along in the late `90s) had no honor or legitimacy in trying to explore his sex life. Looking right at the TV cameras and saying nothing happened was completely honorable because the news media deserved to be lied to.
I can see this. I can see how people being hammered about personal matters might start thinking this way. But then again…
If you’re willing to lie to someone, you’ve opened the door to dissing them in other ways. Just as Lancaster and Holden and friends were fine with lying to railroad men as well as stealing their money and possibly shooting them during hold-ups, I’ll bet celebrities are thinking about different ways of smacking around tabloid reporters.
That photographer who got shot with a BB pellet while standing outside Britney Spears’ Malibu home…? Just the beginning.
9/11 Movies
“Do we really need dramas about 9/11 so we can exploit the tragedy and suffering and add to the hysteria? It’s bad enough we have a manufactured war. Do we need manufactured crap to incite us further?” — Edward Klein
“I don’t know what bothers me exactly about the 9/11 movies coming out. There were plenty of movies about WWII, and a lot of them made during the war, but those were sort of rah-rah propaganda movies about a war that was absolutely necessary. The Vietnam films seemed hell-bent on showing us the real story behind a war that no one seemed to understand, and many of them revealed the suffering that the troops went through before and after the war.
“But those 9/11 films that are being prepared seem pointless. Why make one? What…there’s no actual footage? People have yet to see what happened? That’s not an argument since it was the single most videotaped event in the history of the world.
“So it must be a desire to reveal what people inside the towers and their families have dealt with during and since that day. No, since there have been countless news reports and documentaries and books and official reports letting us know the horrors of the attack and it aftermath.
“So what could possibly be motivating filmmakers about to start on their 9/11 movies…?
“The whole thing reeks of sickening commercialism. Greedy Hollywood vulture fuckheads who have no shame in exploiting people’s emotions and patriotism for a buck. This is example #5930 of how Hollywood is bereft of ideas. And I love how these guys have somehow talked themselves into thinking that they’re going to be doing some kind of service to mankind.
“It reminds me of the moment at the Oscars when James Cameron, holding his Best Picture award, asked the bejeweled, collagen-injected crowd for a moment of silence in memory of the victims of the Titanic disaster. It was both tasteless and ridiculous, and that event was almost 100 years old at the time. Just imagine how tasteless and ghoulish a 9/11 movie will be a mere five years after the tragedy.” — Mark Smith.
“I don’t see much in a script that attempts to retell an individual story from the events of 9/11. Anyone with a digital cable box can see documentaries from every point of view nightly on cable . HBO had an effective film several years ago that told the story of a boy whose mother was stuck in the towers and died that day.
“Hollywood could use 9/11 in a plot device for a romance — strangers fall in love while searching for a mutual friend who is missing. A sci-fi scenario where a character time travels and ends up in the towers. I think an audience could be accepting of 9/11 in film as long as it is not that literal. Spike Lee used 9/11 as a minor character in 25th Hour. — Ken Ridge, Hazlet, New Jersey.
Grabs
42nd Street between 7th and 8th Avenues — Thursday, 8.19, 10:25 pm.
Bedford Avenue underground — Thursday, 8.19, 7:35 pm.
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