Please, God…don’t give the 2007 Best Picture Oscar to Elizabeth: The Golden Age. Not because it doesn’t deserve the honor (I’ve seen nothing, know nothing) but because of that atrocious, calcified coffee-table book title. It sounds like a PBS documentary with a fund-drive during the intermission. Ask yourself, readership: if you were Shekhar Kapur and feeling wonderful about having directed a real, full-hearted “movie” that was also a stirring historical drama about Queen Elizabeth (who reigned from 1558 to 1603) with the great Cate Blanchett in the lead role, would you want it to be called “Name, Colon, Bland Allusion to Rich Cultural Era in 16th Century England“?
I’ve amended my Best Picture Oscar Balloon list down to eight — American Gangster (Universal Pictures); Atonement (Focus Features); Charlie Wilson’s War (Universal Pictures); Elizabeth: The Golden Age (Universal Pictures); No Country for Old Men (Miramax); Sweeney Todd (Dreamworks SKG) and There Will Be Blood (Paramount Vantage).
It’s no secret that violent movies about angry, vengeful men tend to be dismissed or undervalued by older, stodgier Academy members, so if this prejudice holds the odds (obviously a spitball calculation made from a long distance away) don’t seem to favor American Gangster (although a friend who’s seen it believes it has the makings and the moxie to go all the way), No Country for Old Men, Sweeney Todd and There Will Be Blood. The music of Stephen Sondheim mitigates Sweeney Todd, I realize, but combine those throat sittings with the visual fetish tendencies of Tim Burton and you’re looking at possible recoils.
Barring a surprise electrical jolt from one of the unseen above or some out-of-the- blue Million Dollar Baby-type entry, that leaves three finalists — Atonement, Charlie Wilson’s War and Elizabeth: The Golden Age. A lavish British period romance with strong performances and great tracking shots, a feel-good ’80s political drama of redemption about a small group of wily Americans doing the right thing (also with strong performances), and a period costumer with presumably fine acting, high political intrigue and battle scenes.
I’ve been fighting a feeling about this situation for the last two or three days, which is that I’m not personally happy with it.
I’ve read Charlie Wilson’s War and have been told that its a strong and satisfying piece. We’ll know the truth about Atonement when it plays Toronto next week and some real Americans with no cousins in England have a look at it. And Elizabeth: The Golden Age has had Oscar written all over it for months. And yet once again the softest, safest and most upbeat-sounding contenders are deemed the favorites because the Academy likes soft (but not too soft), safe (as long as there’s a fair portion of smarts and edge) and upbeat (as long as it’s not too gooey or homilistic).
The other two contenders may be American Gangster and…I don’t want to say. If I could wave a magic wand and put No Country for Old Men in as contender #5, I would, but I fear too many people are going to take it as crime movie about a good old cowboy on the run with some ill-gotten drug money and a creep lugging around a device that shoot-slams metal pellets into people’s heads. Some might get what it’s really about — the simple basic decency of the past giving way to an oncoming indecent present — but not enough, I fear.
I hope I’m wrong. Please God…step in and do the right thing. And please don’t give the ’07 Best Picture Oscar to Elizabeth: The Golden Age. Not because it doesn’t deserve the honor (I’ve seen nothing, know nothing) but because of that atrocious coffee-table title. It sounds like a PBS documentary. Ask yourself, readership: if you were directing and feeling wonderful about making a real, full-hearted “movie” that was also a stirring historical drama about Queen Elizabeth (whose reign lasted from 1558 to 1603) with the great Cate Blanchett, would you want it to be called “Name, Colon, Bland Allusion to Rich Cultural Era in 16th Century England”?
The slate for the 34th Telluride Film Festival (Friday, 8.31 through Monday, 9.3) has been announced, and while there are many smart and stirring selections made by men of good taste, there are also no major pulse-quickeners or mind-blowers. It’s basically a bunch of Cannes stuff along with a few Toronto ’07 selections.
The idiosyncratic standouts for myself (if I were attending, that is) are a Norman Lloyd documentary (Matthew Sussman‘s Who Is Norman Lloyd?, a look at Lloyd’s 70 years as an actor-producer-writer) and a digitally remastered version of Richard Lester‘s Help!
The only thing that could save Telluride ’07 from “meh” status will be if that rumored-but-later-denied showing of a There Will Be Blood reel (as part of the Daniel Day Lewis tribute) turns out to be real.
The slate includes…
Todd McCarthy‘s Pierre Rissient: Man of Cinema, about the influential publicist, sometime film distributor and film buff who discovered talent such as Jane Campion and Abbas Kiarostami.
Lee Chang-dong‘s Secret Sunshine, which “stars Jeon Do-yeon, winner of the Best Actress prize at Cannes, as a young woman trying to adjust to a new life with her young son amidst tragedy.”
Who Is Norman Lloyd?
Rails and Ties, Alison Eastwood‘s directorial debut [which] stars Kevin Bacon and Marcia Gay Harden in a story about two families in physical, emotional and psychological collision.
Julian Schnabel‘s The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
Cristian Mungiu‘s film, 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days.
Eran Kolirin‘s The Band’s Visit
Wayne Wang‘s A Thousand Years of Good Prayers.
Stefan Ruzowitzky‘s The Counterfeiters.
Persepolis, Marjane Satrapi and Vincent Parronaud‘s adaptation of Satrapi’s graphic novel of the same name.
When Did You Last See Your Father?, David Nicholl‘s adaptation of poet-novelist Blake Morrison’s memoir, directed by Anand Tucker, tells the story of a son’s conflicting memories of his dying father.
Todd Haynes‘ I’m Not There.
Barbet Schroeder‘s Terror’s Advocate.
Sean Penn‘s Into the Wild,.
Baltasar Kormakur‘s Jar City.
Etgar Keret and Shira Geffen‘s Jellyfish.
Li Yang‘s Blind Mountain.
Sarah Gavron‘s Brick Lane.
Kevin Macdonald My Enemy’s Enemy, a documentary “that tracks Nazi war criminal Klaus Barbie, a.k.a. the Butcher of Lyon.”
Aleksei Balabanov‘s Cargo 200.
Noah Baumbach‘s Margot at the Wedding.
Werner Herzog’s Encounters At The End of The World, an exploration of “the vast empty splendor of Antarctica and the meaning that Herzog, with the help of physicists, biologists and volcanologists, tries to extract meaning from it.
Khuat Akhmetov‘s Wind Man.
Mark Kidel‘s Journey with Peter Sellars.
Mark Obenhouas‘s Seep!, a doc about extreme skiing.
I spoke yesterday with Jeff Garlin, the director, writer and star of I Want Someone to Eat Cheese With (IFC First Take), which finally opens limited on 9.5.07. “Finally” because fans of this film — an agreeably witty and poignant character comedy in the general vein of Paddy Chayefsky‘s Marty — have been waiting to see it in theatres since it played and scored at the 2006 Tribeca Film Festival, about 16 months ago.
After catching it a couple of months later at at the L.A. Film Festival I called Garlins’ film “a Big Fat Greek Wedding for witty fat guys, only without the wedding or the slobbery cattle-yard relatives.”
It’s a sharply written (here and there genius-level) comedy-drama about a witty, likably humble Chicago comedian named James (Garlin) who lives with his mom but badly wants a soulmate girlfriend. Vaguely fortyish, James is saddled with a yen for slurping down junk food late at night (which costs him in the romantic department), and he’s pretty good at getting shot down or turned down or fired.
But as gloomy as James sometimes gets (and for good reason), he’s tenacious in a shuffling, good-natured, comme ci comme ca way, and you can’t help but feel for the guy and want him to succeed.
Director-producer-writer Garlin — best known for his ongoing role as Larry David’s manager in HBO’s Curb Your Enthusiasm — and his fellow performers (Bonnie Hunt, Sarah Silverman and a team of Chicago-based actor pals) are all top-notch. And in an unassuming little-movie way with the emphasis on spirit and tone and quirky-hip humor, Cheese works.
One thing: The fact that there’s no Cheese website doesn’t exactly help matters. IFC and Weinstein almost never pay for websites, but Garlin does pretty well and lives a fairly flush life, so he could obviously afford to pay for it himself….but he hasn’t. He could get a decent site designed and launched for less than $10 grand. If you the reader had a good little film you’d made and nourished and brought along step by step, wouldn’t you make sure it had a website one way or another? I sure as shit would.
Anne Thompson reported yesterday that Marc Forster‘s The Kite Runner (Paramount Vantage, 11.2), which is performed in Dari, and Julian Schnabel‘s The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (Miramax, 12.17), which is spoken entirely in French, will be ineligible for a Best Foreign Language Feature Oscar because they’re both considered “American productions with foreign elements.”
The totally immobile, left-eye-blinking, lip-drooping Mathieu Amalric in The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
I don’t know from the Forster (Thompson is hearing it’s “a crowd-pleaser” and a “tearjerker” but not necessarily “a critics’ picture”) but the Schnabel is, I feel, a non-starter because it boils down to being a beautifully rendered immersion into a state of total paralysis. Except the beautiful renderings are for naught because you’re still trapped in the mind and body of a real-life guy named Jean- Dominique Bauby (Mathieu Amalric), an Elle editor was left totally paralyzed in the early ’90s after suffering a massive stroke, unable to express himself except by blinking his left eye.
After seeing it in Cannes three months ago I called it “a passable attempt to render a beautiful, inwardly-directed portrait about what is truly essential and replenishing in life. But the film is neither of these things, and is nowhere close in terms of poetic resonance and emotional impact to Schnabel’s Before Night Falls (’00). It’s sensitively realized and skillfully made, but it’s a movie about a state of nearly 100% confinement that itself too often feels confining.
“I’m all for living and fighting until the last, but winking your way through an extremely restricted version of living tests the limits of this positivist philosophy.”
Everyone knows Once is (a) one of the most affecting audience “heart” movies of the year and yet (b) it can’t push its way past $6.5 million so far, which means it hasn’t even been seen by a third of the hip urban indie audience, much less a sizable percentage of the schmoes who only go to broad-ass, heavily marketed, big-name movies from the major distribs. So how can Fox Searchlight cajole the reluctant masses into seeing John Carney‘s little musical?
(l. to r.) Kidman, Damon, Linney, Clooney, Hanks, et. al.
A good idea hit me over lunch yesterday, and it came from Steven Spielberg‘s willingness to give a Once-plugging quote to USA Today‘s Anthony Breznican in a piece than ran three days ago. In a phrase, Once can get moving with mainstream viewers through celebrity endorsements. Print ads and perhaps even internet video spots that would basically say, “Hey, some people you know fairly well are really into this film.”
If the great Spielberg is willing to give it up by telling Breznican that “a little movie called Once gave me enough inspiration to last the rest of the year,” why can’t other big names be approached and asked for a friendly little quote as well? And then Fox Searchlight could make a little ad campaign out of all the celebs who are willing to stand up. Pure alpha, no money involved, and no agents pulling their usual selfish crap. The celebrity roster wouldn’t even necessarily be limited to actors and directors who are in business with Fox Searchlight. If you’re a recogni- zable name and you love the film, you’d simply say this (over the phone or email, or on camera), and that would be that.
Films like Once are obviously good for everyone’s spiritual health, and I’m given to understand that a lot of industry above-the-liners are heavily into it (as indicated by that Spielberg quote). So why not say this out loud? If folks like, say, Brad Pitt or Julia Roberts or Ron Howard or Tom Hanks were to offer testimonials it would be almost analogous to signing their names on a stop-global-warming petition.
What would a typical big name actor say if 20th Century Fox came to them and said, “Hey, how about giving us a personal endorsement of Live Free or Die Hard? We need to boost business.” Any self-respecting pro would either laugh in their face or be so disgusted by the low-rent cravenness of such a proposal that he/she probably wouldn’t even respond. But Once is different. Once is a vibe, a song…a poor little church. Once is something you see and get or you don’t. Once exists in its own realm.
If any agent says to his or her client, “You absolutely can’t do this because if you do it’ll open a floodgate and the indie marketing crowd will never leave you alone,” tell them this is a Once-off, one-time thing and that’s all. No debate, no ifs or buts …just stand up and say it and put a bloom on your day.
And as long as we’re kicking this around, the best way to do this would be to shoot a series of video spots in which the celeb would riff about the film for a couple of minutes the way others have done for spots about movies and politics for the great Errol Morris, and then cut together a series and run them on the internet. TV would presumably be too expensive for Searchlight’s Once budget but they could always go that way down the road.
Note: Apologies to Breznican for confusing his name with Scott Bowles‘ when this thing first went up.
I sat through a memorable showing of Showgirls once at Robert Evans‘ Beverly Hills home in the early fall of ’95. In Evans’ legendary rear bungalow, that is, behind his egg-shaped pool in the backyard of his French chateau-styled place on Woodland Avenue. With Jack Nicholson of all people, as well as Bryan Singer, Chris McQuarrie, Tom DeSanto and two or three others. With everyone hating it but sitting through the damn thing anyway because Nicholson had come over to see it and nobody wanted to be contrary.
All that ended when Nicholson, who was sitting right under the projection window against the rear wall, stretched his arms and put his two hands right in front of the lamp. The resulting hand-silhouette on top of Elizabeth Berkeley and her grinding costars conveyed his opinion well enough, and suddenly everyone felt at liberty to talk and groan and make cracks and leave for cigarette breaks. Nicholson and Singer ducked out at one point, and I joined them. (I had recently seen Paul Verhoeven‘s film and had no desire to suffer a second time.)
I was Evans’ journalist pal that year. I had written a big piece about Hollywood Republicans earlier that year for Los Angeles magazine, and Evans had been a very helpful source. As a favor I’d arranged for him to meet some just-emerging GenX filmmakers — Owen Wilson, Don Murphy, Jane Hamsher, et. al. — so that maybe, just maybe, he could possibly talk about making films with them down the road.
Anyway, it was sometime in late September and Evans, myself, Singer, DeSanto and McQuarrie were having dinner in the back house, and Evans was doing a superb job of not asking the younger guys anything about themselves. He spoke only about his past, his lore, his legend. But the food was excellent and the vibe was cool and settled.
Then out of the blue (or out of the black of night) a window opened and Nicholson, wearing his trademark shades, popped his head in and announced to everyone without saying hello that “you guys should finish…don’t worry, don’t hurry or anything…we’ll just be in the house…take your time.”
What? Singer, McQuarrie and DeSanto glanced at each other. Did that just happen? Evans told us that Nicholson was there to watch Showgirls, which they’d made arrangements for much earlier. He invited us stay and watch if we wanted. Nobody wanted to sit through Showgirls — the word was out on it — but missing out on the Nicholson schmooze time was, of course, out of the question.
There was a little talk after it ended. I recall DeSanto (Apt Pupil, X-Men, X2, Transformers) introducing himself to Nicholson and Jack, who had brought two women with him, saying, “And it’s very nice to meet you, Tom.” Gesturing towards Girl #1, he then said to DeSanto, “And I’d like you to meet Cindy and…” Lethal pause. Nicholson had forgotten the other woman’s name. He recovered by grinning and saying with a certain flourish, “Well, these are the girls!” The woman he’d blanked on gave Nicholson an awful look.
We all said goodbye in the foyer of Evans’ main home. Nicholson’s mood was giddy, silly; he was laughing like a teenaged kid who’d just chugged two 16-ounce cans of beer and didn’t care about anything. I was thinking it must be fun to be able to pretty much follow whatever urge or mood comes to mind, knowing that you probably won’t be turned down or told “no” as long as you use a little charm.
The Envelope‘s Tom O’Neil wrote earlier today to ask for a quote about the Best Animated Feature race as it looks now. His piece just went up, but here’s my summation in my own words: Ratatouille is the front-runner but the matter of Beowulf‘s classification is far more interesting.
I’ve seen most of the 3D Beowulf product reel that played at Comic-Con, and the digital work has convinced me that it’s the most out-there and avant-garde-ish animated stuff I’ve seen in ages — far more so than Richard Linklater‘s Waking Life or A Scanner Darkly, and way in front of Robert Zemeckis‘s Polar Express.
Here’s how I wrote it…
“By far the best animated film of the year so far is Ratatouille — forget the Simpsons, forget Shrek the Third, and, given the indications so far, it’s hard to think of Jerry Seinfeld‘s Bee Movie as any kind of serious Ratatouille competitor. Look at the new one-sheet, listen to Seinfeld discussing it in Cannes….draw your own conclusions.
“Ratatouille rules because it says something that is true and generous that everyone recognizes as true (or wishes were true), which is that not anyone can be an artist but that art can come from anywhere. To an Academy person, this could be taken to mean that an electrician or a makeup artist or a bit player can write a screenplay or direct a film that everyone will love or which might even win awards. That is music to the Academy’s Unwashed Masses, and this is why Ratatouille has, at this stage, the clear lead. Apart from the fact that it’s one of the best and brightest animated films ever.
“But the most interesting animated film so far is Beowulf, which I saw a reel of footage from yesterday. Projected in 3D, it looked to me like the trippiest and most absorbing animated footage I’ve seen in ages, although it may not, according to the Academy’s “Rule Seven,” be an animated film. ‘May’, I say.
“Beowulf is a real eye-popper and clearly something other than the realm of animation. Each and every frame is ‘animated’ by any standard of digital recomposition, and yet the Academy seems to be saying that any film that begins with live-action performance and then uses digital animation to enhance or augment that performance (like, say, Linklater’s two above-named films) is not eligible. Again — this is not the final word.
“The animation in Beowulf, which isn’t “animation” at all, is definitely painterly, and at the same time it’s obviously not unvarnished reality. And yet it began at the core as live-action footage of the actors (Ray Winstone, Anthony Hopkins, Angelia Jolie, etc.) shot in a room full of sensors that captures their performance in a bare-bones, Samuel Beckett style at Culver Studios in early ’06.
“Rule Seven of the Academy rules regarding Best Animated Feature film say that a contender has to be “a motion picture of at least 70 minutes in running time, in which movement and characters’ performances are created using a frame-by-frame technique. In addition, a significant number of the major characters must be animated, and animation must figure in no less than 75 percent of the pictures running time.”
Beowulf screenwriter Roger Avary is calling the 3-D Beowulf “digitally-enhanced live action”. It’s also, in my view and without question, animation. It’s also mind-blowing. I loved it. I can’t wait to see the whole feature.
Beowulf, says Avary, is “enhanced live action” and as such is “closer to Ralph Bakshi‘s painting over cells, the rotoscoping of 2-D imagery, even though Beowulf is about the rotoscoping of 3-D imagery. The 3-D version will be the largest 3-D release of all time. It will be released also in Real-D, a new 3D process, and IMAX 3-D.
“More and more, the differences between animated and real-life action is starting to blur. The form is changing, and rather than limit actors with this technology, Zemeckis is actually trying to figure out a way that can broaden what an actor can do.. He want to make sure it’s about performance…this is the first time that the technology doesn’t get in the way…it’s technology allowing you to fall deeper in the performance.”
I can’t decide which adjectives or catch phrases to use in this review of Paul Greengrass ‘s The Bourne Ultimatum (Universal, 8.3). I’m really kinda stuck. Pulse-pounding, edge-of-your-seat, bobsled, warp-speed, heart-in-your-throat…how many hundreds of times have I read those terms? It’s gotten so they don’t mean very much. But this final Bourne flick does, I feel, “mean” something. That is, apart from the fact that all I could say for the first five or ten minutes after coming out of last night’s screening was “whoa” and “wow.”
The Bourne Ultimatum is, naturally, one steriod orgasm action blast after another, but that’s expected. What else could it be with those two super-Bourne‘s before it? So let’s try and quantify. I think it’s an action movie milestone in two ways. One, by pushing the velocity-junkie aesthetic to new super-pleasurable extremes. And two, by being so good at this go-fast game that you don’t care that those hallowed dramatic substances — character brushstrokes, echoes, deep-down emotion, dialogue that addresses something besides story points. — are all but absent. You just don’t care. You’re in adrenaline heaven.
The best analogy I can think of is William Friedkin‘s subway-chase sequence in The French Connection, which lasted…what?…12 or 13 minutes? The Bourne Ultimatum runs 111 minutes and it has, at the most, 12 or 13 minutes of down time. The basic action-movie manual says you’re supposed to let the audience catch a breath between “musical numbers.” Ultimatum has a few of these, short ones, but they’re all assessment scenes about what just happened or what may be coming ’round the bend. You never feel as if Greengrass is downshifting to any serious degree (i.e., no sensitive love scenes, no “I’m tired and I need to sleep,” no talking softly while cooking in the kitchen).
Think of the three Bourne movies as high performance engines. Doug Liman‘s The Bourne Indentity (’02) had a few moments that took place in first and second gear, and one or two (the love scenes between Matt Damon and Franka Potente) in neutral. Greengrass’s The Bourne Supremacy (’04) was a serious increase experiment — a major pedal-tromp, cut-faster, crazy-legs thing — but even that film had moments of relative calm when emotion was given a little room to spread out (i.e., the death of Potente, the remorse scene in Moscow at the end). But Ultima- tum is even more high-octane than this. Everything, it seems, is flying in third, fourth and fifth gear. Not a single neutral moment…not one.
When I lean forward in my seat during a film it usually means I’m in pain. At last night’s screening I was leaning forward but without my hand covering the lower half of my face — a significant thing. I was in one of those “holy shit, am I going to be able to keep up with this?” modes. It was like driving at high speed and being afraid to take your eyes off the road. A friend tapped me on the shoulder during the third act (i.e., the New York portion) to share a quick observation, but I reflexively flinched and indicated with my hands that I couldn’t talk, not then, not even for five seconds…good God.
I was bitching after the second Bourne about Greengrass’s overly-fast editing during three or four action scenes. There’s a point at which hyper-cutting can be too much, but for whatever reason I was cool with it this time. Was there a different aesthetic this time? Was there an editing-room motto that said “no cuts longer than two seconds” on Supremacy and one that said “no cuts longer than three seconds” on this new one? I don’t know. I wasn’t carrying a stop-watch.
There was one moment when I realized Damon was no longer in London, but in Madrid. There had been nothing that said “travel” or “cultural transition”…he was just suddenly there. Nor is there any footage given to his flight from Europe to New York City. No getting to or coming back from airports, no taxis, no jet lag…none of that. It’s all hammer-hammer-hammer.
I’ve written dozens of times about hating action movies in which the hero is unstoppable, unwoundable, unkillable. Damon’s Jason Bourne is all these things and more. He’s a damn cyborg — no eating, no sleeping, no stopping for anything — and I loved it. And yet if I see some lower-level action star do the same thing in some run-of-the-mill B movie two weeks from now, I’m probably going to hate it. Why? The Bourne Ultimatum is coming from a high-thread-count, ahead-of- the-curve place that I hadn’t quite tasted or imagined before last night. It’s an action movie for people who think they’re too sophisticated to enjoy them.
When Damon took out three guys in a first-act scene set in London’s Waterloo station, I didn’t cringe for a second at the improbability of such a move. I loved it, the audience loved it and we all clapped. I imagined the bad guys (i.e., young grunt-level assassins) as being in the employ of Dick Cheney and all the other black-heart D.C. hardballers, and seeing them get beaten and out-maneuvered time and again is a joyous thing.
The triumph of Jason Bourne in this film is, no lie, a triumph of humanism. Bourne is not a sadist or even a killer as much as a survivor. The movie is not about killing villains as much as shaming them — making them fail so badly and so repeatedly that they have no choice at the end but to go to jail, give up or re-think their game.
There’s a hand-to-hand combat scene in Tangier between Damon and a contract assassin named “Desh” (Joey Ansah) that’s an instant classic. It’s right up there with Sean Connery‘s fight to the death with Robert Shaw in the train compart- ment in From Russia With Love. Above and beyond it, I’d say. I’m trying to think of others in this class.
Each and every computer works perfectly in this film, and everyone has light-speed broadband. Each and every cell-phone video transmission and upload works every time. Technology is perfect, dazzling and awesome at every step. The Bourne Ultimatum is a fantasy film.
There are lines every now and then that sound a little flat, a little pulpy…but I wouldn’t call them speed bumps. The only thing I really didn’t care for is a bit in which (I need to be careful here, can’t say when it happens) a simulation of a certain state of being is offered for several seconds, and is then reneged upon just so Greengrass can go “fake out!” It’s a cheat, a schmuck move.
I could do the whole plot recitation thing and congratulate all the actors for being note-perfect…okay, I’ll do that. Damon is The Man, and I’m really, really sorry that he’s declared that this is the final Bourne. He is so much more “the guy” than Daniel Craig, and I’m fine with Craig. Cheers to Joan Allen, Julia Stiles (especially good in her one-on-one scenes with Damon), David Strathairn, Scott Glenn, Paddy Considine, Edgar Ramirez and the dozens of other actors who make it all seem sharp and true.
A crisp salute to screenwriters Tony Gilroy, Scott Burns and George Nolfi, and a deep bow of respect to cinematographer Oliver Wood, editor Christopher Rouse, composer John Powell, production designer Peter Wenham. The biggest tip of the hat goes to Greengrass, of course — he is truly the top dog in the high I.Q. action realm. I love Bloody Sunday, United 93, The Bourne Supremacy …the guy hasn’t slipped up once. It’s good to have him around. Someone this good, I mean.
Those damn gringos in the Paramount Home Video art department have made an error — culturally insensitive, clueless — on the cover for the Babel two-disc special edition that comes out on 9.25.07. DVD Beaver‘s Eddie Feng pointed this out in a 7.19 e-mail to Paramount Home Video’s Deborah Peters, to wit:
They couldn’t fit Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu’s full name on the DVD cover art, so they simply shortened it up a bit. Yo…got a problem wit dat? The all-inclusive art on the Babel DVD
“Hey, Deborah — You should talk to someone who puts together artwork for your DVD covers, ” Feng began. The new Babel 2-disc cover states that the movie is directed by ‘Alejandro G. Inarritu.” This is a serious misprint.
“Spanish speakers use two last names; the first one is their father’s last name, and the second is their mother’s last name. If they use only one last name, then it’s just the father’s last name. Thus, Alejandro’s legal short name is Alejandro Gonzalez, not Alejandro Inarritu. Gonzalez is not his middle name, so it shouldn’t be abbreviated to an initial. If you want to use an initial, then the custom would be “Alejandro Gonzalez I.”
“Please look into making this change before Paramount is ridiculed by the millions of Spanish-speaking customers that you have here in the United States and abroad. — Eddie Feng, DVDBeaver.com.”
As Cheech Marin once said to me in an interview about ten years ago, “This city is called Los Angeles” — pronoucing it “Los-angeleeze” — and not “Los Anglos.”
Helmeted state trooper (points to Marin): “Hey, where are you from?”
Marin: “Where am I from?”
Trooper: “Yeah, where are you from?”
Marin (singing): “Born in East L.A. Man I was….born in East El-laahayaay.”
How much of the current 20th Century Fox-vs.-internet critic hoo-hah is about simple communication skills, or a lack thereof? The thorniest relationship problems have a way of disappearing like that when this or that combatant decides to apply a little charm and openness and friendly back-pats. And yet I’ve long noticed a curious reluctance on the part of certain Fox publicists to being responsive and friendly (as opposed to be polite or “correct”) and talking frankly about things — the upper-crusters believe they’re too good to actually talk to writers who don’t work for Newsweek or the N.Y. Times — and returning phone calls.
These tendencies, I’ve found time in the past, are usually rooted in the personality of this or that senior executive. Frosty butch-boss publicists are unfortunately a fact of life in this town. You have to get over them or get around them or placate them or something, but they’re not going to go away. I could name five or six of the worst ones right now, but what would that get me? It’s usually best to just ignore them and do your work, and then six months down the road you’ve forgotten what the fight was about and so have they and it’s back to business as usual.
What’s happed in the Fox situation is that hissy-fitters have poisoned the well by refusing to return calls or be truthful (I was apparently lied to about Chicago Film Critics Assn. boycott being a non-starter) or communicate quickly about this or that, and many journalists have become irate about this and now there’s a “situation.” Needlessly. And yet once these things start, it’s hard putting out the fires.
Right now everyone hates Big Fox (although Fox Searchlight is totally cool …they’re not in this in my book) and online critics all over the country are voicing complaints, writing pieces about these complaints and pledging solidarity with the Chicago Film Critics Assn. boycott on features about Big Fox and Fox Searchlight films. “Twentieth Century Fox is on the edge of an internet publicity crisis,” L.A. Times reporter Gina Piccalo has written.
This will all go away sooner or later. It always does. Besides, who cares about Babylon AD, Starship Dave, Alvin & The Chipmunks, Alien vs Predator 2? These are all instant dumpers in my mind. The only one that looks good is Doug Liman‘s Jumper…maybe.
Brad Bird‘s Ratatouille (Disney/Pixar, 6.29) is, in all ways but one, a sublime experience. Call it a gifted-underdog-fights- the-odds fable (it’s about a French rat named Remy who manages to become the most admired chef in Paris) and a very entertaining souffle by way of inspired writing, delightful wit, great voice-acting and eyeball-popping digital animation. It’s not a great film, but it satisfies and then some.
The visuals are so good and dazzling that Ratatouille delivers a perpetual throb sensation within your moviegoing heart. See it for any reason that comes to mind — the reviews alone have been highly persuasive — but absolutely don’t miss the drop-dead sumptuousness of each and every shot, cut, backdrop and camera move. Hats off to Pixar supervising animator Mark Walsh, character designer Luis Grane, character developer Andrew Gordon and all the grunt-level animators who did what they were told.
A story about fate, struggle, luck and love, Ratatouille is another brisk and bouncy animated heart comedy with another egalitarian theme — “anybody can cook.” What makes it special for an animated wing-ding is that it has the world-view of a 55 year-old gourmand with a seasoning of old-soul wisdom. The wise and brilliant writing is by Bird, Jim Capobianco, Emily Cook, Kathy Greenberg and Jan Pinkava.
Ratatouiille is such a scrumptious foodie ride that I was thinking halfway through that it’s going to make things a little bit tougher for Scott Hicks‘ No Reservations (a remake of the beloved Mostly Martha) which costars Catherine Zeta Jones and Aaron Eckhart and comes out on 7.27.
Like most commercial-minded animated features, Ratatouille has the frisky, frizzy energy of a gifted 12 year-old and one of those “ohh, man, we are looking to entertain the shit of you!” attitudes. And we all know you can’t get away from that kind of presentation if you’re looking to deliver mass-market orgasms and stay rich while doing so.
I went in expecting a thermonuclear blowout and I came out…uhm, definitely pleased. Not floating on helium, but happy. I’m not sure if it’s the best Brad Bird flick ever made (I’m extremely partial to The Incredibles) but it is not, as a certain bigmouth has proclaimed, “the best American film of 2007 to date.” So far it’s a three-way tie for that title — Zodiac, No Country for Old Men and that early-fall drama I saw four days ago that I still can’t blab about. Ratatouille is a close fourth behind these three. It is obviously a contender for the Best Animated Feature Oscar, but then you knew that.
My reservation is this: I wish Bird and John Lasseter and the Pixar guys had summoned the balls to throw out the expected commercial family-flick shtick and made a deeper, more complex and more “adult” film — something less anxious to please, a little braver and riskier by being a touch more complex.
I realize that laser-sharp digital animation and whirylbird camerawork from guys determined to live flush lifestyles means that the story has to follows certain formulaic guidelines, but somebody has to break the mold some day, and that will mean not automatically siphoning the material through the rubber hose of an “animated kids movie.”
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