I loved Joe Mantegna and particularly Ron Silver as production execs Bobby Gould and Charlie Fox in the 1988 B’way production of David Mamet‘s Speed-the-Plow, but (this may sound like blather but screw it) I was charmed, aroused and finally knocked flat last night by Jon Tenney (Kyra Sedgwick‘s boyfriend in TNT’s The Closer) and … Read more
In tribute to the opening of Sydney Pollack‘s Sketches of Frank Gehry (Sony Classics, 5.19), which is easily one of the most spiritually uplifting films you’ll see this year (and I mean this), I did a phoner with Pollack a couple of weeks ago to recap and go over things. The sound file is sufficient, … Read more
Not-So-Bad Summer A typical summer season always seems to come down to one big-budget, lowest- common-denominator no-brainer after another…Hollywood being sort of like Steve McQueen firing diseased buckshot into the body aesthetic with a pump shotgun… wham!…discharge…wham!…discharge. I was thinking along these lines myself the other day, but that was before I began to really … Read more
Rally Round If a movie is going to try and tell the truth about a real event, I believe it should stick as closely as possible to what is actually known, and if certain things about this event aren’t crystal clear then that should be acknowledged and somehow worked into the film. With this theory … Read more
Sweet Bird of Youth It’s not so much how the 23 year-old Marlon Brando looked, although this is fascin- ating in itself. It’s more the metaphor of a life not yet blemished or sullied…an aura of freshness, vitality, raw presence. These are stills from a screen test Brando made in 1947 for a planned film … Read more
Toasting Herzog Time‘s Richard Corliss and Richard Schickel are both smart and crafty film critics, but I’ve never regarded them as providers of radiant cinematic wisdom…until today. They’ve both chosen a Werner Herzog documentary as their favorite film of ’05 — Corliss going for The White Diamond and Schickel for Grizzly Man — and the … Read more
Miller’s Crossing On Thursday afternoon I hitched across the Williamsburg Bridge (the trains didn’t start running again until Friday morning) and then walked up to East Soho to pay a visit to Capote director Bennett Miller. The idea was mainly to say hello (we’ve been talking since last summer on the phone) and to take … Read more
Midlife Surge Maybe I’m slow, but my awareness levels suddenly shot up the other day about Gong Li, Gong Li, Gong Li…some eighteen years after her film debut, and just over three months shy of her 40th birthday. This was after hearing she gives the big burn-through performance in Memoirs of a Geisha (Columbia, 12.5). … Read more
Norman Lloyd, 90, is in only three scenes in In Her Shoes and is on-screen maybe seven or eight minutes, but his performance is one of the most poignant notes in a film that’s got more than a few of them. It’s not one of those burn-through-the-screen performances (along the lines of, say, Beatrice Straight’s … Read more
Girl Power It was early Wednesday afternoon, and I was standing in the hallway of the 26th floor of Toronto’s Four Season’s hotel, waiting for my ten-minute quickie with In Her Shoes director Curtis Hanson. And then a door opened about three feet away and Shoes costar Shirley Maclaine, who owns each and every scene … Read more
Master Builder Sydney Pollack’s Sketches of Frank Gehry , which I caught yesterday at a public screening at the historic Elgin theatre, is a stirring, hugely likable portrait of the most daring and innovative architect of our time. As corny as this sounds, Sketches left me with a more vivid feeling of celebration and with … Read more
The winding down of the ’05 summer is fortunate in two respects: it’s getting a tiny bit cooler in the city (there was a transcendent breeze travelling southward down Broadway Monday night around 9:30 pm), and it gives me something to write about during a flat week. It felt to me like an above-average summer. … Read more