Did I believe disgraced football player Michael Vick‘s pre-scripted apology on 60 Minutes last night for running a sadistic dog-fight operation that landed him in jail and all but destroyed his career? Nobody did. The guy can’t act. Plus he never talked about his deep-down attitudes and feelings about dogs and how he could see them not as super-loyal friends to love and care for but as snarling gladiators good at killing and being killed. On top of which 60 Minutes interviewer James Brown was too scared to touch on the real cultural “why.”
Dog-fight culture is an ugly thing that stems, I believe, from a predatory, inner-city, watch-your-back vibe that its fans initially encountered in their growing-up neighborhoods. But Vick and Brown never even glanced at, much less alluded to, this. Because that would take them into the machismo thing that has obviously influenced African-American and Hispanic guys of a certain economic strata and their seeming preference (based on years of my own first-hand observation) for fearsome attack dogs. Too close to the bone so they dodged it entirely.
Vick revealed his true self with three lines. The first came when he began one his unconvincing run-on apologies with “whatever the reasons I did this.” (translation: “I probably know why but I sure as shit ain’t gettin’ into it on nationwide TV”). The second came when he said “I don’t know how many times I gotta say [I’m sorry].” (translation: “I’m gettin’ a little sick of apologizin’ over and over for this shit”). The third was his admission that “the first day I walked into that prison and he slammed that door…I knew the magnitude [and] the poor judgment that I allowed to happen to those animals” (translation: “Damn…gettin’ caught and being punished sucks!”)
“It’s wrong, man, ” Vick said. “I don’t know how many times I gotta say it. I feel tremendous hurt about what happened. I deserve to lose the $135 million [contract]. I feel disgusted because of what I allowed to happen to those animals. The first day I walked into that prison and he slammed that door…I knew the magnitude and the poor judgment that I allowed to happen to those animals…I cried over what I did, being away from my family, letting so many people down, letting myself down….being in a prison bed, in a prison bunk…that wasn’t my life, that wasn’t the way things were supposed to be…[and all] because of the so-called culture I thought was right and cool…I thought it was fun and exciting at the time.”
Whoever cut this Werner Herzog interview about Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans has as much editing expertise as yours truly, which is to say next to none. Movie City Indie‘s Ray Pride posted it this morning. Sorry for the Vimeo. If John Cusack and other occasionally mercenary actors do a straight paycheck movie now and then, so can Werner Herzog.
So here I am, the last guy in the world weighing in on Neill Blomkamp‘s District 9. It’s obviously a semi-thoughtful, hard-jolt, sit-up-in-your-seat thing from a young director out to make a name for himself. I was never bored and knew all the time I was watching a riveting, exception-to-the-rule sci-fi actioner. It’s certainly the best film I’ve ever seen that has the name “Peter Jackson” in the opening credits. It’s hard and mean and fast and fat-free, so Jackson must have left Blomkamp alone. Hard to accept but the proof’s in the pudding.
The racial apartheid/crappy ghetto metaphor fueling the story of alien “prawns” having been abandoned on earth like alien “Marielitos” and being kept in a kind of outdoor concentration camp/shanty town….all to the good. I fell 100% in love with that static image of the massive alien mother ship hovering over Johannesburg. The way the dust and polluted sunlight made it look slighty hazy in the distance…perfect.
But then I began to half-wonder why it was hovering, frankly. When you think of the energy required to counteract earth’s powerful gravity to keep a 150-million ton craft from crashing to earth…so much waste! And all because Blomkamp wanted it kept in the air because it looks cool.
Sharlto Copley‘s performance is…well, okay. He starts out as a smiling dork who’s married the boss’s daughter only to screw up when he’s asked to direct the relocation of the prawns confined to District 9 to another concentration camp….this is a sloppy sentence. But I’m not going to fix it. I’m the last guy to review this film so I can take liberties.
Copley, a sort of poor man’s Daniel Day Lewis, was, for me, too much of a grinning dork during the first 15 minutes, and then once he’s infected with the liquid and starts growing a prawn arm all he does is run around with wild eyes and breathlessly going “oh my gawd,” “no!,” “please!,” “I love my wife!” and so on. He never gets in front of the situation and studs-up. I wanted him to channel a little Clint Eastwood but he never lets go of the dork moves.
It’s a style movie in the sense that Blomkamp decided early on to desaturate the color and create an experience that was all about piss and beans and dust and garbage and gooey-gross-outs and scuzzy Nigerians. It’s an exceptionally well-honed and vigorous film for its type (i.e., the political sci-fi actioner), and I think it’s fair to say Blomkamp has cut his teeth and made his bones in the tradition of the first two Mad Max films.
But it’s not a movie that sent great waves of pleasure surging through my system. I liked it and respected the craft that went into creating the dusty, crappy-ass look of it. But bit by bit I began to feel a little trapped, and I gradually began to think about escaping. I wanted to see it through to the end, but watching it began to feel like being in a room with no a.c. during mid July, and I didn’t care for the sensation.
There’s so much garbage, dirt, dust and detritus in this film that I started to feel physically dirty after a while. I almost began to smell the stench. I began to feel like taking a shower or at least using some sanitary wipes.
If someone had come up to me and said “if you give me $20 bucks I can fix it so that the movie will stop with the dust and the desaturated color and all the scuzzy gooey stuff and cut to a full-color scene in a fashion mall with a couple of pretty women talking about nothing over margaritas,” I would have given him the money. Dust! Fucking smelly dust and skanky garbage and black goo leaking out of wounds! I needed to get away from this for a minute or two.
And I wasn’t all that rocked by the way the story rocks and lurches, taunting you into thinking “aah, okay, things are going to work out” only to pull the plug and leave you in the lurch, only to push the plug it back into the wall again. Up, down, in and out, oh my God!, here we go!, hair-trigger, cliffhanger. Writing a story along these lines is a wanker’s game. Come to think of it, it’s an old Peter Jackson tactic.
And I’m not a big fan of “the cackling villain who can’t be killed & shan’t be killed until the very end” cliche. Nor do I admire endings that leave everything & everyone hanging in the lurch in preparation for the sequel. District 9 is definitely playing this game.
But I agree with those who’ve been saying that Michael Bay could learn a thing or two from Blomkamp. District 9 is watchable and inventive and alive on the screen, which is more than you can say for Transformers 2.
District 9 director-writer Neill Blomkamp (r.), guy who plays the ultimate bald/studly/heavily-armed bad-ass.
The Toronto Film Festival press office team hasn’t made its final, last-minute calls about who will be getting press badges for the forthcoming festival (9.10 to 9.19). They’re re-reviewing the situation next Monday, a rep says. It nonetheless seems curious, especially considering the rampant implosion of print outlets all over the world, that the TIFF-ers are giving three well-read, thoroughly respectable online voices — Movieline‘s Stu VanAirsdale, Spoutblog‘s Karina Longworth and Cinemablend‘s Katey Rich — the vague idea that they may not make the cut. Or that they might…not sure yet!
(l. to r.) Movieline‘s Stu VanAirsdale; Spoutblog‘s Karina Longworth; Cinemablend‘s Katey Rich; In Contention‘s Kris Tapley.
On top of which In Contention‘s Kris Tapley, owner and master of one of the key quality-calibrating, awards-chasing sites that shifts into high gear starting with Toronto, has tried to get himself credentialed this year instead of the previously credentialed In Contention correspondent John Foote (Tapley having told Foote he’ll be taking over the beat). Tapley has nonetheless been told by the TIFFers, “Uhm, sorry, but we already have Foote covering for your site.” In response to which Tapley said, “Uhm, no…I’m covering this year for my site, not Foote.” In response to which the TIFFers said, “Uhm, sorry, but we already have Foote covering for your site.”
On top of which the very smart, aggressive, constantly poking-and-hammering film blogger Rodrigo Perez of The Playlist (whom I read daily because he’s always on to something I haven’t heard about) has been officially turned down . This just doesn’t add up. Perez is no fanboy. He’s on the Big Picture 24/7, chasing down scripts, putting his nose into things, assessing the whole equation, etc.
It’s kind of a strange way to treat a crew of respected, trend-spotting, ahead-of-the-curve types. Is the newspaper community not deflating and shrinking? Are the ad dollars that are spent online not starting to overtake print in some markets? It’s a profound changing-of-the-guard situation going on, and festivals, bless ’em, always seem to be slow to wake up to the new-coffee smell.
Whatever the final determination the Toronto Film Festival begins three and half weeks from now and they’re keeping these guys, who need to figure out plane travel and some hotel-room situation as far in advance as possible in order to get good deals, on pins and needles. Longworth, Tapley, Van Airsdale, Rich and Perez are hardly new to the net or the festival circuit. Longworth especially is…Karina Longworth! And Stu is, like, Mr. Shoe Leather. And Tapley is a brand-name guy who collects ad dollars from the biggies every fall and winter.
They’ve all been around, paid their dues, earned their stripes. Tapley does ComicCon and has been to Sundance. Two of them covered Cannes last May. VanAirsdale has been credentialed for Sundance and Cinevegas, and his Moveline colleagues did a bang-up job last month covering ComicCon. Rich covered ComicCon also and has done Showest.
It’s just seems sorta weird and clueless, is all. The Tapley situation especially, which sounds like something out of Kafka.
A TIFF press relations spokesperson told me this morning that (a) “we’ve pulled the files of the people you mentioned [and] we’ll be re-reviewing these files on Monday,” (b) “We get hundreds and hundreds of applications each year and have only a certain amount of passes to give out each year…there are about 1000 revolving/returning press people who come each year and every year we decide on about 200 new people,” and (c) “There are certain outlets we’ve said no to — the ones who focus just on celebrities, for instance — because we want steady persistent festival coverage…it’s not who they are as much as how persistent their coverage will be.”
I was just on the phone with a very polite and gracious twentysomething lady who works for a major film-related organization. And there was a problem. I couldn’t grasp half of what she was saying. This was because (a) she had one of those breathy little mincey peep-peep voices, and (b) she used the cadences and curious tonalities of “mall-speak,” in which simple declarative sentences like “the cat ran up the tree” sound like hesitant questions, as in “like, the cat, uhm…I heard, like, ran up the tree?”
And when she kindly spelled the names of two people I need to call, she couldn’t seem to roll with the practice of pheonetic pronunciation (“e” as in elephant) so it took twice as long to get the spellings sorted out. Again partly due to that little peep-peep mouse voice. “Thanks a lot for your time and your help,” I said as part of my farewell. I meant it. She was nice. But mall-speak drives me nuts.
If a movie is bad in an altogether grand-sweep way, it is also bad in hundreds of small particular ways. Quentin Tarantino‘s Inglourious Basterds, which is going to choke and die when it opens on 8.21, is such a film. I didn’t think very much of it after seeing it at Cannes — I mainly complained that it’s too long-winded — but I caught it a second time last night and it really didn’t go down well.
Spoiler whiners are hereby warned to stay the hell away because I’m going to spoil the hell out of a certain scene that happens in the first act. Not a crucial scene in terms of plot turns, but one that exposes the Basterds game.
Inglourious Basterds, as costar Eli Roth and others have stated, is basically a World War II Jewish payback movie in which all kinds of brutal and sadistic killings of Germans (be they troops, officers or members of the Nazi elite and/or high command) are presented as not only righteous but delicious because “them Nazis,” in the parlance of Brad Pitt‘s Lt. Aldo Raines, are viciously anti-Semitic and deserve it all to hell.
I began hating Inglourious Basterds for the boredom (which is to say the repetition and the banality of making a movie about a cruddy ’70s exploitation movie and self-consciously smirking about this movie-ness from start to finish) and the acting (which is mostly wink-wink “bad” in a kind of ’70s grindhouse way) but mainly for something that didn’t hit me when I first saw it three months ago. I realize it’s a Quentin movie that’s basically about Quentin’s bullshit, but — I’m trying not sound like a rabbi here — Inglourious Basterds reeks of arrogance and sadism and indifference to the value of human life.
It’s a movie in which brutal death happens every which way, and by this I mean stupidly, callously, carelessly, plentifully. I began to hate it early on for the way it takes almost every character down (including ones Tarantino appears to favor) with utter indifference. Kill this one, kill that one…this is too much fun! Especially since we’re doing it to the Germans, who did what they did to the Jews. Shoot ’em, beat ’em, burn ’em, strangle ’em, roast ’em….yeah!
I hated it, in short, because it doesn’t give those German pigs a fair shake. I hated it because it has the same attitude about those damn Nazis that the damn Nazis and the other anti-Semites had about the Jews in the lead-up to the attempted implementation of the Final Solution. As Shepherd Wong says in Woody Allen‘s What’s Up Tiger Lily, “Two wongs don’t make a wight.”
I know, I know — a film that wink-winks its way through an arch movie-movie landscape can’t be faulted on moral grounds because it’s not playing with any kind of real-world cards. That’s a fool’s rationale. There’s no such thing as pure off-the-ground fantasy. All movies are tethered to some kind of world view that takes stock of the way things are outside the realm of make-believe. And the reality of this movie is basically a result of Tarantino having divorced himself so totally from making films about real life in favor of movies-about-movies that he’s drawing upon nothing except cool-cat attitude and smug satisfaction and fair-weather-friend (i.e., Harvey Weinstein‘s) flattery.
Tarantino has stuck his finger up his ass and given it a good sniff and smelled lilacs and gardenias so many times that he’s lost his mind, which is to say he’s lost whatever sense of proportion he may have once had about the relationship between free creative imaginings (which he’s obviously had a rollicking good time with in years past) and the way life actually is when you get dressed and put your shoes on and get in your car and put the key in the ignition and deal with the situation.
Inglourious Basterds is proof that QT has gone batshit crazy in the sense that he cares about nothing except his own backyard toys. He’s gone creatively nuts in the same way that James Joyce, in the view of some, crawled too far into his own anus and headspace when he wrote Finnegans Wake. (With no apostrophe between “n” and “s.”) All I know is that this is a truly empty and diseased film about absolutely nothing except the tip of that digit.
The scene in which it all starts to smell rancid is one in which Pitt and the Basterds — a ragtag group of Jewish soldiers conducting guerilla-style search-and-destroy missions throughout German-occupied territory — interrogate a captured German soldier. He is Sgt. Werner Rachtman (Richard Sammel), who appears in the above trailer starting at the 16 second mark and exiting at 48.
The bottom line is that Pitt and Roth, who plays Sgt. Donnie Donowitz (a.k.a., ‘the “Bear Jew”), behave like butt-ugly sadists in this scene while Sammel behaves like a man of honor, character and dignity.
Tarantino has Sammel defy Pitt by saying “fuck you and your Jew dogs” so it’ll seem right and fair that an anti-Semite gets his head beaten into mashed potatoes with a baseball bat. But what speaks louder is (a) Sammel’s expression, which is clearly that of a man of intelligence and perception, (b) his eyes in particular, which have a settled quality that indicates a certain regular-Joe decency, and (c) his refusal to give Pitt information about nearby German troops that would lead to their deaths if he spilled.
Isn’t this is what men of honor and bravery do in wartime — i.e., refuse to help the enemy kill their fellow soldiers, even if it means their own death?
Compare this anti-Semitic but nonetheless noble fellow with the smug and vile Pitt, who does everything but twirl this moustache as he contemplates the delicious prospect of seeing blood and brain matter emerge from Rachtman’s head.
And then comes a protracted and tedious build-up in which we hear Roth’s baseball bat banging against the stone walls of a darkened tunnel as he approaches the daylight and Sgt. Rachtman, who is kneeling next to Pitt. Whack, whack, whack, whack. Forever, interminably. Only a director who has truly lost his bearings would make an audience listen to that sound this much — 14, 15 times. And then Roth finally comes out of the tunnel and beats Rachtman to death. And then he screams and shouts with joy, going all “whee!” and “yeah!” and “all right!”
This is one of the most disgusting violent scenes I’ve ever sat through in my entire life.
Morally disgusting, I mean.
It didn’t make me want to see the Inglourious Basterds Germans come out ahead, but after this point I felt nothing for Pitt and his boys except loathing. All I knew is that they’re scum and that if they wind up dying, fine. No skin off mine. I don’t think this is the reaction Tarantino was looking for. I’m a Martian, I realize, and it’s quite possible that most viewers of this film are going to be cackling and giggling along with Pitt and Roth, but maybe not. Either way it’s not going to make anything after the first weekend.
If you half-liked and half-disliked Basterds the first time, my advice is to let well enough alone and don’t see it again because it’ll totally fall apart. You’ll be moaning and writhing in your seat like me. I tried to keep it down, but Jett told me later on that I was over-the-top with it.
“I’m the bad guy for saying it’s a stupid country,” Bill Maher said during last Friday’s New Rules rant, “yet polls show that a majority of Americans cannot name a single branch of government, or explain what the Bill of Rights is. 24% could not name the country America fought in the Revolutionary War. More than two-thirds of Americans don’t know what’s in Roe v. Wade. Two-thirds don’t know what the Food and Drug Administration does.
“Some of this stuff you should be able to pick up simply by being alive. You know, like the way the Slumdog kid knew about cricket.
“Not here. Nearly half of Americans don’t know that states have two senators and more than half can’t name their congressman. And among Republican governors, only 30% got their wife’s name right on the first try.
“Sarah Palin says she would never apologize for America. Even though a Gallup poll says 18% of Americans think the sun revolves around the earth. No, they’re not stupid. They’re interplanetary mavericks. A third of Republicans believe Barack Obama is not a citizen, and a third of Democrats believe that George Bush had prior knowledge of the 9/11 attacks, which is an absurd sentence because it contains the words ‘Bush’ and ‘knowledge.'”
There’s a letter describing the American yahoo brigade on Andrew Sullivan‘s Daily Dish. Here’s a portion:
“They have always been with us, the people who believed in manifest destiny, who delighted in the slaughter of this land’s original inhabitants, who cheered a nation into a civil war to support an economic system of slavery that didn’t even benefit them. They are the people who bashed the unions and cheered on the anti-sedition laws, who joined the Pinkertons and the No Nothing Party, who beat up Catholic immigrants and occasionally torched the black part of town. They rode through the Southern pine forests at night, they banned non-European immigration, they burned John Rockefeller Jr. in effigy for proposing the Grand Tetons National Park.
“These are the folks who drove Teddy Roosevelt out of the Republican Party and called his cousin Franklin a communist, shut their town’s borders to the Okies and played the protectionist card right up until Pearl Harbor, when they suddenly had a new foreign enemy to hate. They are with us, the John Birchers, the anti-flouride and black helicopter nuts, the squirrly commie-hating hysterics who always loved the loyalty oath, the forced confession, the auto-de-fe. Those who await with baited breath the race war, the nuclear holocaust, the cultural jihad, the second coming. They make up much more of America then you would care to think.”
I’ve just come out of a 4 pm public screening of Amy Rice and Alicia Sams‘ By The People: The Election of Barack Obama at Manhattan’s Sunshine Cinemas, and I’m sorry to say it’s a fairly bloodless portrait of one of the most fascinating, breathtaking, sometimes ugly, occasionally transcendent, up-and-down racial-tinderbox elections in our nation’s history. It’s up-close and somewhat intimate and sorta kinda dull at times. Not novacaine dull but glide-along, yeah-yeah dull.
You’d never really know what a heart-pumping ride Obama’s two-year campaign for the White House was by watching this nicely assembled but excessively mild-mannered doc.
Rice and Sams were given extraordinary close-up access to candidate Obama and his innermost circle (David Plouffe, David Axelrod, Robert Gibbs, etc.) as well as Michelle, Sasha and Malia. The co-directors caught some good stuff along the way (Obama tear-streaking when speaking about his recently-deceased grandmother, a ten year-old campaign worker patiently dealing with a contentious voter over the phone, etc.) but it almost seems as if Rice and Sams agreed to let Axelrod and Gibbs co-edit the film with an aim to de-balling and up-spinning the final version as much as possible.
This seems especially apparent given the overly-diplomatic and toothless portrait of Hillary Clinton‘s campaign. Her current position as President Obama’s Secretary of State obviously means it would have been very politically awkward for a documentary to bring up her frequently ugly, race-baiting campaign tactics and so — I don’t mean to sound over-cynical and pat-minded but how else am I to process this? — Rice and Sams have given her a near-total pass.
There’s no mention of Hilary’s incessantly playing rhetorical race cards, talking about how working white people support her, etc. There’s no footage or even a mention of Bill Clinton, and therefore no mention of his post-South Carolina primary remark that Obama’s victory in that state was somehow comparable to Jesse Jackson ‘s win there in the mid ’80s. There’s no mention of Hillary’s cynical campaign speech about how Obama “will bring us together and the heavens will part” speech, which she delivered, as I recall, during the Ohio-and-Texas primary campaign. There’s no mention of Hillary’s made-up Bosnia story about dodging bullets when she visited that country in the mid ’90s. There’s no mention of Samantha Power‘s “Hillary is a monster” comment. There’s no mention of Hillary’s bizarre refusal to concede when she should have (i.e., after Obama had his electoral-vote triumph sewn up) and how she had to be stern-talked into doing so by Congressional and Senatorial colleagues.
It’s even more bizarre that the racial resistance factor among white voters — surely the central hurdle of Obama’s campaign — is only faintly acknowledged. We’re shown a clip of a couple of younger Bubbas stating that Obama’s ancestry is a problem, but that’s just about it in terms of Rice and Sams catching the backwater attitudes that were brought up by reporters and the political talk-show crowd nearly every damn day during the primaries and the general election,
The Reverend Wright issue is raised (how could it not be?) along with Obama’s historic Philadelphia speech about racial relations. But there’s no mention of Michelle taking heat for saying that the positive response to her husband’s campaign was cause for her feeling proud of the U.S for the first time in a long time. There’s no mention of that idiotic terrorist fist bump flap. No YouTube clip of that West Virginia cracker lady on the back of that motorcycle expressing cultural shock at the sound of Obama’s name. There’s no mention whatsover of the fear of the Bradley Effect, a now-discounted concern that white voters might change their minds about voting for a black candidate in the privacy of the voting booth due to latent racism. And Obama’s decision to finally cut all ties with Reverend Wright is completely ignored also.
And there’s very little mention of the general campaign against John McCain and Sarah Palin. It accounts for maybe ten minutes out of the film, which runs somewhere close to two hours. (I should have timed it but didn’t.) No right-wing stirring of the racial pot, no mention of McCain’s “The One” ad (and no clip of David Gergen explaining that the racial coding of that ad was clear to anyone who grew up in the South), no expressions of bone-dumb ignorance (“He’s…I think he’s an Arab”) and/or racial hatred at McCain and Palin rallies (“Kill him!”),
There’s some good B-roll footage of Obama playing basketball with friends, but the best photo-op basketball moment of the entire campaign — i.e., the moment when Obama made a near-perfect shot from outside the penalty circle in front of an audience of troops in Iraq — is missing. It leads you to suspect/presume that Rice and Sams didn’t cover last summer’s Middle East/European tour, and to ask why.
In sum, For The People comes pretty close to being a political chick flick. Which is to say it emphasizes emotionality and intimacy at the expense of the fierce melodrama and primal intensity that were fundamental aspects of the story. I could be mean and call it a puff piece and….you know something? It’s not being mean to say that because it more or less is that.
Because of these factors By The People is not likely to be seen as a contender for the Best Feature Documentary Oscar. Gentleness and a lack of edge don’t tend to stir people. You can’t be in bed with your subject when you’re portraying him/her in some journalistic form. I’m not saying that Rice and Sams were in fact emotionally entwined with the Obama campaign, but the doc makes it seem as if they were. And that’s a no-no. You have to step back and disengage and be merciless, if necessary.
There are several little things in the film that are pleasing or revealing in this or that minor way. But the fact is that most of the film is not focused on Obama himself as much as his campaign staff, and much of this footage feels like B roll. The narrative emphasis in the doc is somewhat akin to the kind of backstory you might pass along to your grandmother as you show her your family photo album and explain this and that. It’s too kindly and considerate and smoothed over..
It’s been pointed out by a friend of Rice and Sams that “the filmmakers made the film they wanted to make…it’s called By The People. And they captured the emotion of the campaign.” On this last point I respectfully disagree.
Charlyne Yi is a fascinating reason to see Paper Heart, a lightweight faux-documentary that costars (in the dreariest, least assertive way possible) Michael Cera. Fascinating because she represents a relatively fresh sensibility among comedians (if that’s what you want to call her), which is to say a comic who’s better at making you cock your head and go “wait…is that it?” than getting laughs.
She’s a kind of shtick-free permutation of a 21st Century Andy Kaufman — a curious comedian whose strangely undeveloped (i.e., arrested) childlike personality is about behavior and conceptual weirdness and being button-cute in a kind of hospital-gown One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest way.
Her weirdness is underlined at the very beginning of Nick Jasenovec‘s film, which opens today, when she’s seen asking several people if they “believe” in love while saying time and again that she doesn’t. That’s interesting to hear from a 23 year-old, but the film never provides a hint about why Yi is so averse to, as she puts in in the press notes, “love at first sight” or any of that “Julia Roberts/English Patient/sobbing in the rain stuff.”
There has to be a story behind this (or a series of stories) but instead this made-up (or at the very least unconvincing) doc-with-marionette-sequences presents Yi as some kind of plucky little chipmunk-cheek alien with a pixie grin and nary a thought of any depth or consequence, or any kind of semi-developed curiosity. She doesn’t seem rooted in any sort of recognizable experience. She’s like a cyborg programmed to be “different” for its own sake. And that voice…my God! It’s like she decided years ago that she didn’t want to move past the emotional state of being eight or nine years old.
Every little girl knows something about love — families and pets and rock-star worship start them out, and then sooner or later, usually by the time they’re 16 or 17, they start to experience a semblance of the real romantic version (with a boy or a girl…whatever). It’s a common enough thing that if a woman turns 23 without having ever felt or tasted, even briefly, that curiously heightened state of hormonal-and-spiritual arousal, and in fact has come to a decision to be foursquare against it as a concept, then you’re talking about someone with a relatively unique history, and one you’d like to hear about.
Charlyne Yi
You look at Yi and figure, okay, she’s not conventionally “hot” so she hasn’t had much action so far, and she’s obviously invested in being a curio type so naturally she would create a character who’s atypical but still…there’s nothing here except nerditude. Not in the film, at least, because it provides no answers, no layers, no payoff…zip.
What happens is that she half falls in love, puppy-dog style, with Cera, the biggest and nerdiest 20something one-tricky-pony in the film business. Really — the sameness and underwhelmingness of the man is almost stunning. He has this clever deadpan/dorky space-cadet thing going on — obviously very bright, a little bit “cute”, a little smartass, a little aloof/withdrawn and topped with a mall-nerd haircut that infuriates me. He was perfect in Superbad — wise, sly, an almost transcendent figure — when paired with the hyper, motor-mouthed Jonah Hill. He was agreeably whatever in Juno but since then seems to have…I don’t know, calcified or something.
Which isn’t to say Cera isn’t lightly likable and “appealing” in a bright-but-vacant sense, but I predicted last September that he might be two or three years from being over, and I see no reason to back away from this. He doesn’t do anything other than radiate that same old Cera-ness , over and over and over. You have to do more than this to stay in earth orbit. You can’t just be a zone case.
But I say again that Yi is worth watching and reacting to. She’s got an original vibe that deserves your contemplation. I’m not sure that she has anything to say or put across other than odd quirk, but she’s got something, whatever it is. Something a bit more, I mean. An otherness that you can’t quite dismiss. Or which at least is more interesting than Cera’s.
The full-length trailer of Peter Jackson‘s The Lovely Bones (Paramount, 12.11) will be unveiled, I suspect, sometime Thursday night. Here’s an Entertainment Tonight teaser, courtesy of Trailer Addict and In Contention. No matter how good, period-perfect, overbearing, great or commercially problematic the film turns out to be (and I’m mentioning the last possibility due to alleged concerns in this realm), it will certainly bear the Jackson stamp. And you know what that means.
It means that The Lovely Bones will try to dazzle, caress, smother, cajole and generally work you over like Lou Ferrigno until you drop to your knees in submission. Or until you rebel. Or — this is what I’m hoping for — audiences are won over by a poetically sad and elegant human drama that has the integrity not to try and sell its immaculate sensitivity.
It seems as if CHUD’s Devin Faraci is ready to surrender, and that’s fine. I’m a declared Jackson hater and that’s fine too, but I’d love to get off that train and start hearing/playing another tune. I’d be delighted if the lighter-touch Jackson of Heavenly Creatures would make a return. I would love to move on and give up the hate. Which, I realize, is boring to read about.
“Jackson surprised everyone [at a small ComicCon presser] by showing a four minute sizzle reel for The Lovely Bones,” Faraci writes. “What we saw was essentially an extended trailer, but it offered a serious look into the world Jackson had created — not just the main reality of the book but also the afterlife which main character Susie Salmon (Saoirse Ronan) visits after being brutally murdered.
“The footage was simply sumptious. Jackson’s eye for period detail was right on (the story is set in 1973); he successfully evokes the era without ever rubbing your face in the 70s aspect of it. The real world was filled with rich, dark hues while the afterlife was brighter, often candy colored. We saw moments in the afterlife without context, and the scenes were fantastical, including a shot where huge ships sail into giant bottles. Susie walks across a lake to come to a lavishly lit floating gazebo. She stands in the middle of speeding traffic on a busy night road. A hippy girl dances gaily at the very curvature of the green Earth.
“The idea, which is in the book, is each person experiences [heaven] based on what their life experience is,” Jackson said. “What Susie experiences in her afterlife is based on being a 14-year-old in 1973 and…the pop culture that she’s grown up with and the life experiences she’s had. For our research in the afterlife, we actually looked at episodes of The Partridge Family. Which is not where you normally go for the afterlife.”
“While the afterlife material was visually intriguing, I was most interested in the real world scenes. This will be where the meat of the film happens. 14-year old Susie, is lured into an underground room by neighbor George Harvey (Stanley Tucci), who rapes, murders and dismembers her. Susie’s family must deal with the loss of the daughter and the open-ended nature of the case, all while Susie watches – and tries to communicate — from beyond.
“Tucci is almost unrecognizable. It took me a minute to figure out who the guy was under the make-up.
“‘Stanley liked the idea of playing the part, but I think he was terribly worried about being spat on in malls because he’s a very, very evil character,’ Jackson said. Luckily for the actor his director envisioned a very different appearance for him. ‘Stanley also liked the idea of looking the least like Stanley Tucci as he possibly could.’
“It was Tucci who really stood out; in just a couple of snippets he was utterly convincing playing a cold-hearted evil man, and also a guy who was hiding in plain site, just out of the reach of the law. There’s a scene where Tucci sits on his couch being interviewed by a police detective that will, I think, be electric in the final film. What I saw was impressive, and if voters can get past the evil of the character, I think Tucci could be looking at an Oscar nomination.
“The big question mark for me remains Mark Wahlberg, who came in at the last minute (Ryan Gosling had originally held the role) and who seems to be wearing a cheesy wig. He plays Susie’s dad, a role requiring lots of pain, grief and anger. We didn’t see enough to really get an idea of how Wahlberg plays it, but Jackson did tell us what surprising film won the actor the role.
“We really liked his comedy that was in I Heart Huckabees, and one of the things with the character of Jack Salmon is he’s an obsessive. I mean, he’s kind of an obsessive in a gentle, comedic way, and he’s an obsessive in his relationship with his daughter. And then when she dies and he’s wracked with guilt, but he’s also thinking, ‘Who did this? Who did this?’ And he becomes obsessed with finding the killer. So we wanted somebody, but we didn’t again want to play that heavy and make it maudlin.”
“The entire project is a tricky one; Jackson himself said that the book doesn’t lend itself to a cinematic structure, and the tone of the story is tough to nail. One moment we’re in a strange afterlife with Susie and the next we’re with her grieving, destroyed family. And in the end the film is the story of the brutal slaying of a teenage girl, not the easiest subject. I don’t think that the visuals of the film were ever in doubt, and if they were the four-minute extended trailer removed all of it. But how will the film itself play?”
Keith Olbermann‘s “special comment” last night about rampant Congressional corruption in the face of proposed public-option health care reform was/is a classic. He stated the basics, which is that Republicans are paid big money for serving the insurance industry, Big Pharma, hospitals, HMO’s and nursing homes. Same deal with Blue Dog Democrats. He named names, ripped them thoroughly and warned these lying nobles with impending job loss.
“I could bring up all the other Democrats doing their masters’ bidding in the House or the Senate,” Olberman said. “All the others who will get an extra thousand from somebody if they just postpone the vote another year, another month, another week, because right now without the competition of a government-funded insurance company, in one hour the health care industries can make so much money that they’d kill you for that extra hour of profit, I could call them all out by name.
“But I think you get the point. We don’t need to call the Democrats holding this up Blue Dogs. That one word ‘Dogs’ is perfectly sufficient. But let me speak to them collectively, anyway.I warn you all. You were not elected to create a Democratic majority. You were elected to restore this country. You were not elected to serve the corporations and the trusts who the government has enabled for the last eight years.
“You were elected to serve the people. And if you fail to pass or support this legislation, the full wrath of the progressive and the moderate movements in this country will come down on your heads. Explain yourselves not to me, but to them. They elected you, and in the blink of an eye, they will replace you.
“If you will behave as if you are Republicans — as if you are the prostitutes of our system — you will be judged as such. And you will lose not merely our respect. You will lose your jobs.
“Every poll, every analysis, every vote, every region of this country supports health care reform, and the essential great leveling agent of a government-funded alternative to the unchecked duopoly of profiteering private insurance corporations. Cross us all at your peril.”
Sharon Waxman‘s things-are-looking-pretty-scary-at-Universal piece on The Wrap reported that Uni execs “unsuccesfully lobbied” Funny People director Judd Apatow “to cut the film by a half-hour.” This is surprising or startling? Aren’t suits always pressuring directors to cut their films? My point is that sometimes urging this isn’t wise for the film’s sake, and that this was one of those times.
Update: It’s understood by everyone except for Asian and Eastern European cave-dwellers that Adam Sandler plays a self-centered comedian in the film — i.e., a guy with a personality/attitude problem. Any idiot knows that 98% of movies that deal with this sort of thing always resort to some kind of “third-act wake-up” element. It’s great when you come across the occasional exception (such as Martin Ritt‘s Hud) but everyone knows about the 98% rule…hello? Nonetheless, some have complained about the following graph so here’s a spoiler warning…okay? The same whiners might also want to slam Roger Ebert for calling his Judd Apatow interview piece “Apatow on How To Learn Nothing From a Near-Death Experience.”
I realize I’m in the minority, but I had hardly any problems with Funny People ‘s final third. For me it satisfies because it delivers the Big Payoff. By this I mean the two big revelations about Adam Sandler‘s character — that (a) even a brush with death hasn’t modified his selfish-prick tendencies and yet (b) he has the capacity at the very end to at least recognize this shortcoming and to try to make amends with someone he’s hurt and pushed away.
For me it’s almost a Vincente Minelli/The Bad and the Beautiful -type ending. You obviously have to know this film and the ending to get what I’m saying.
I’m writing this because I really hate what that Waxman paragraph is implying, which is that Funny People is a problem movie facing an uphill box-office struggle. Not that she’s necessarily wrong but I hate the act of spreading poison pollen about a film that really doesn’t deserve it. A tough time with the lowbrows may be in store, but Funny People is an ascerbic, funny and relentlessly honest film that is quite personal and revelatory on Apatow and Sandler’s part.
And while I realize that Waxman wasn’t gunning for Funny People per se, the import of that paragraph in her story is emblematic of what creates an iffy/downbeat buzz in advance and helps to bring about a negative result.
I know — I sound like an Apatow publicist or propagandist.
Let’s say that perhaps Universal suits did want him to cut 30 minutes from the film’s final section. The point, as I understand it, is that Funny People was a creative gimme for Apatow. It was basically one of those “okay, I’ve made everyone a lot of money and now it’s time for me to make a growth-arc movie which may not kick box-office ass but will do reasonably well” type deals. Name-brand filmmakers have to make growth-arc films from time to time or they’ll go stale and flat.
It’s just unfortunate that Apatow’s growth-arc flick is being released in the midst of one of Universal’s most disappointing box-office streaks in a long while.
It’s doubly gloomy that NBC-Uni honcho Jeff Zucker admonished top Uni execs with these words: “Easy-to-digest concepts and wish fulfillment is in vogue. That’s not our slate. And the choices have been too costly. You’ve got to fix both those things.” In other words, put on your shallow hats and lower your standards.
Waxman reports that tracking indicates it may earn $20 million this weekend.