Every Sundance festival you have to re-learn the same lesson — you can’t see three or four films per day plus file about them with any clarity much less eloquence if you’re also going to attend a late-evening party or freebie lunch or dinner and/or socialize and…well, not exactly chase skirt but do the dance of that. It really doesn’t work, and the tension between the usual filing requirements (which I have no trouble handling when I’m home) and the transporting ether of constant smiles and attention (particularly from devastating blondes, the company of whom I never keep in New York or Los Angeles) can really drive you nuts.
The films and the reviews are paramount, of course, but the Sundance aura can feel like a truly perfect weekend in high school with your parents away. The lah-lah must be resisted, of course. I will not allow my ship to crash on the rocks. You have to be hard and strong and face once again who you are and the degree of commitment required to do the damn job…yikes. This gig is hard enough without the siren call.
“C’mon, Wells — we’re not paying you to party and sleep,” a reader wrote last night. “Write some reviews.” Well, I’m trying to do that right now as I sit in the Yarrow Hotel lobby, dealing with the arctic blasts of air that surge in every time the automatic glass door opens. It’s 10:40 am and I’m realizing now that I’m going to have to blow off Smash His Camera, Leon Gast‘s doc about legendary paparazzo Ron Gallela, which press-screens at 11 am. I’m going to try and catch Mark Ruffalo;s Sympathy for Delicious at 12 noon, followed by Animal Kingdom at 2:30, Welcome to the Rileys at 5:30, The Runaways at the Eccles at 6:30 and 3 Backyards at 8 pm.
I have a theory that thousands and perhaps tens of thousands of 50-and-overs have been turning on over the holidays because of the cannabis laughing scene in Nancy Meyers‘ It’s Complicated. It’s a contact high and the most enjoyable scene in the film. My guess is that it gave various boomers and older GenXers the idea, especially, I’m guessing, as a fun New Year’s Eve activity. If attractive and sophisticated Meryl Streep and Steve Martin can do it, why can’t we?
I’m not going to name names, but I’m well acquainted with a lad of 21 whose divorced mom recently saw It’s Complicated, and who very soon after asked the young lad to score a little weed on behalf of her mid 50ish boyfriend, who hasn’t turned on in 20 years. Young lad went all the way out to Coney Island to cop yesterday afternoon, and then had to train it back to Manhattan and drop off the two or three grams. He preemptively bought rolling papers on the assumption that the above-mentioned couple wouldn’t have any.
I think this is fairly hilarious. If anyone can report any first- or second-hand observations along these lines, I’m all ears.
MCN’s Michael Wilmington has assembled a somewhat lengthy but well-chosen list of 2009 DVDs that he considers the year’s 21 best — most of which I agree with. Wings of Desire, Z, Do The Right Thing, North by Northwest, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, The Wizard of Oz…the usual-usuals.
But surely a key value in determining “best” in this context alludes to high-end appearance. Wilmington should be talking about best looking, best mastered, best restored, etc. But he barely mentions this, focusing instead on the lasting long-view film-bum value of the movies themselves. Which you can get from any greatest-flicks-of-all-time book written by anyone.
And why is Wilmington focusing on DVDs in the first place? Isn’t this a little like writing a piece in 1999 about the best VHS tapes of the year? A sophisticated uptown film hound like Wilmington should be on the Blu-ray beat, period. Has the DVD audience not primarily become dishevelled middle-market and downmarket types who wander about Walmart and Target and Giant stores on Sunday afternoons?
I read Armond White‘s absolute corker of a Precious review yesterday afternoon as I was rushing to the L train and a 5 pm appointment in town, etc. I knew it would be all the online rage and of course it is that now, but everyone knew that White-the-contrarian would go for the kill on this one, especially with the Oprah Winfrey connection. Is White regarded as such a kneejerk trasher of popular liberal-minded entertainments that the spectre of a brilliant African-American critic obliterating Precious won’t count? I wonder.
“Shame on Tyler Perry and Oprah Winfrey for signing on as air-quote executive producers of Precious,” he began. “After this post-hip-hop freak show wowed Sundance last January, it now slouches toward Oscar ratification thanks to its powerful friends.Winfrey and Perry had no hand in the actual production of Precious, yet the movie must have touched some sore spot in their demagogue psyches.
“They’ve piggybacked their reps as black success stories hoping to camouflage Precious‘ con job — even though it’s more scandalous than their own upliftment trade. Perry and Winfrey naively treat Precious‘ exhibition of ghetto tragedy and female disempowerment as if it were raw truth. It helps contrast and highlight their achievements as black American paradigms — self-respect be damned.
“Precious is meant to be enjoyed as a Lady Bountiful charity event. And look: Oprah,TV’s Lady Bountiful, joins the bandwagon. It continues her abusefetish and self-help nostrums (though the scene where Precious carries her baby past a “Spay and Neuter Your Pets” sign is sick).
“Problem is, Perry,Winfrey and director Lee Daniels‘ pityparty bait-and-switches our social priorities.
“Personal pathology gets changed into a melodrama of celebrity-endorsed self-pity. The con artists behind Precious seize this Obama moment in which racial anxiety can be used to signify anything anybody can stretch it to mean. And Daniels needs this humorless condescension (Hollywood’s version of benign neglect) to obscure his lurid purposes.
“Sadly, Mike Leigh‘s emotionally exact and socially perceptive films (Secrets and Lies, All or Nothing, Happy Go Lucky) that answer contemporary miserablism with genuine social and spiritual insight have not penetrated Daniels,Winfrey, Perry’s consciousness — nor of the Oscarheads now championing Precious. They’ve also ignored Jonathan Demme‘s moving treatment of the lingering personal and communal tragedy of slavery in Beloved.
“Both Leigh and Demme understand the spiritual challenges to despair and their richly detailed performances testify to that fact. Gabby Sidibe and Mo’Nique give two-note performances: dumb and innocent, crazy and evil. Monique’s do-rag doesn’t convey depths within herself, nor does Mariah Carey‘s fright wig. Daniels’ cast lacks that uncanny mix of love and threat that makes Next Day Air so August Wilson-authentic.
“Worse than Precious itself was the ordeal of watching it with an audience full of patronizing white folk at the New York Film Festival, then enduring its media hoodwink as a credible depiction of black American life. A scene such as the hippopotamus-like teenager climbing a K-2 incline of tenement stairs to present her newborn, incest-bred baby to her unhinged virago matriarch, might have been met howls of skeptical laughter at Harlem’s Magic Johnson theater.
“Black audiences would surely have seen the comedy in this ludicrous, overloaded situation, whereas too many white film habitues casually enjoy it for the sense of superiority — and relief — it allows them to feel. Some people like being conned.”
Fifteen seconds after my London flight arrived at JFK this afternoon I learned of Patrick Goldstein‘s bullwhip piece accusing me of showing no balls during my interview with Fantastic Mr. Fox director Wes Anderson .
The Big Wimp-Out happened, in Goldstein’s view, when I questioned Anderson about that 10.11 Chris LeeL.A. Times piece that repeated gripes from Fantastic Mr. Fox dp Tristan Oliver and director of animation Mark Gustafson that Anderson (a) made their lives miserable by being an overly-demanding nitpicker (or something like that) and (b) not being on-set and directing the film by e-mail from Paris.
Goldstein felt that I candy-assed out, wasn’t Mike Wallace-y enough and appeared to be in the tank for Anderson when I said the following: “Now if I were being hired by Wes Anderson to work with him, I would have a very clear idea, before we had even talked about the particulars, that I was going to be working with a guy with a very specific, personality-related, stylistically-related thing, right? So I’m trying to get from you how can — what is the best way to expand upon and understand the, uhm, slight griping in that Chris Lee piece…because I don’t understand how anybody could say, well, when you’re going to do a film somebody’s way, you’re obviously going to be adhering to a very particular thing and that’s all there is to it.”
Goldstein supposed that I’d been bent over, bought off and Crisco-disco’ed by the fact that 20th Century Fox had flown me into London and put me up at the Dorchester, which led me to conduct interviews in an obsequious fashion. Well, let me explain as plainly as I can.
I was in the tank for Anderson going in because I don’t like whiners. If you sign up to work with a director (and especially a particular-minded auteur-level director), you don’t whine about the collaboration not being mellow or groovy enough, as Oliver and Gustafson apparently did. You man up and suck it in and ride it out. Making movies is not about feeling personally happy — it’s about artistic servitude and making the best damn movie you can so you can be proud of it when you’re 90 years old.
I have always supported demanding directors whenever people have complained about them being tough to work with. You could easily find (or certainly imagine) similar complaints about demanding, world-class directors like Jim Cameron, David O. Rusell, Brian DePalma, Oliver Stone, Stanley Kubrick, etc. By the same token Tom Cruise could have theoretically said about the making of Eyes Wide Shut, “Gee, I thought we were going to make a movie for two or three months and it wound up taking a year, for God’s sake, and I felt overworked and unhappy!” Talent talks and bullshit walks.
Anderson is nothing if not precise and meticulous, which is why his films (duhhh) have that uniform Wessy-ness…that absolute stamp of personality. So how in the world could Oliver and Gustafson have agreed to work on Fantastic Mr. Fox without understanding that (a) at the end of the day, making it would not be a collaborative effort as much as a “yes, boss…sure thing, boss…how high d’ya want me to jump?” type of thing, (b) that Anderson, having no experience with stop-motion or animation, would simultaneously be on a learning-curve and, being himself, also not looking to do things the usual way, and, more fundamentally, that (c) crafting and imposing an auteurist stamp would somehow be an easy-going, comme ci comme ca endeavor?
On top of which two or three Anderson/Fox collaborators said during junket interviews that Anderson hanging around the set during the months and months of stop-motion photography on Fantastic Mr. Fox would have been counter-productive.
But if some want to think of me as a pants-around-the-ankles type as a result of this fracas, fine. I’ve been a little too much the maverick, contrarian and anti-authoritarian for much of my life. This Fantastic Mr. Fox thing has established a new side to my personality — i.e., junket slut. I’ve earned enough credits on the other side of the ledger to be thought of in this way without incurring any damage.
Oh, and by the way: guess who’s scheduled to be the moderator for the Envelope/LA Times screening series showing of Fantastic Mr. Fox and the q & a with Wes Anderson on November 3rd? None other than Patrick Goldstein.
“An Education, which was shot by John De Borman and designed by Andrew McAlpine, is a morality tale that often plays like high comedy,” saysWall Street Journal criicket Joe Morgenstern. That’s due in large part to Carey Mulligan.
An Education‘s Carey Mulligan
“After seeing the movie last month at the Telluride Film Festival, I wrote that everyone there seemed to be comparing her to Audrey Hepburn. The comparison is irresistible, and not only because Jenny sometimes wears her hair upswept in a Holly Golightly do, or because Hepburn played a young woman opposite an older man in at least three movies — Sabrina, Love in the Afternoon and My Fair Lady. (In five if you count Funny Face and Charade, neither of which dwelled on the age difference.)
“The 24 year-old Mulligan, like Hepburn has a way of endearing herself with little more than a lilting phrase — her speaking voice is as rich as Juliet Greco‘s singing voice — or a flashing glance. But it’s her own way, and she’s her own special edition of a dazzling new star.
“The first time I saw her was almost a year ago, in a superb Broadway production of The Seagull, with a cast that included Peter Sarsgaard as Trigorin; she played Nina, the sacrificial creature of Chekhov’s title. She was electrifying from her first entrance, when Nina speaks of having been in a fever all day, and cries joyously, ‘The sky is clear, the moon is rising!’ Either an actress has the skill to make those extravagant lines her own or she doesn’t, and Ms. Mulligan had skill, and passion, to burn.
“In An Education, where she’s completely convincing as a 16-year-old — the movie was shot two years ago — she has created a complete original. Jenny is, to toss off a French phrase, always on the qui vive; it’s as if she’s listening intently to the life around her for clues about how it works. Both her beauty and her agile mind allow her to be precocious without being insufferable. And she isn’t merely sufferable, she’s admirable for the purity of her responses to culture — Jenny plays the cello as an ardent amateur — if not the clarity of her insights about love.
“When David takes her and a couple of his philistine friends to a concert, she’s the only one who loves the music. (The cello is a magnificent instrument, but I do wish filmmakers would occasionally use another one to signify a lyrical spirit.)
“If purity were Jenny’s main quality, she, and the movie, would be a bore. No danger of that, though, because her motives are mixed, her gift for deviousness is impressive and she, like her semidrab middle-class parents, becomes complicit in a series of choices that may put an end to her dreams of going to Oxford, and bring down the shining promise of her life before she’s ever had a chance to take off.
“The director, Ms. Scherfig, is Danish, but she is manifestly at home working in English. (Her previous English-language features, both highly recommended, are Wilbur Wants to Kill Himself and Italian for Beginners.) Direction can’t be seen, but Ms. Scherfig’s approach makes itself felt in a sparkling stream of felicitous choices. She’s a poet of natural rhythms and intimate insights, and this new film will make her a star in her own realm.
“What it will do for the movie’s star is another matter. One thinks not only of Hepburn, but of Julie Christie bursting upon the world in Billy Liar. That was a very small role, though. Ms. Mulligan is the heart and soul of An Education, and she’s phenomenal. The whole film is phenomenal. I love it.”
What has Telluride 2009 taught us over the last three and a half days? One, that Up In The Air is a lock for a Best Picture nomination and probably the front-runner until Invictus comes along. Two, The Last Station isn’t necessarily a Best Picture contender, but it will surely be acquired forthwith (probably by Sony Classics, I’m guessing). Three, Red Riding is destined for major-cult-film status. And four, Werner Herzog‘s Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans will probably sell more tickets than My Son, My Son because it’s weirder and dopey-loopier by the grace of Nicolas Cage.
A currently in-progress seminar called “The Edge of Humor: When Does the Laughter Stop?,” which began in the Telluride town park at noon today. (l. to r.) Anne Thompson (moderator), Nicolas Cage, George Gittoes, Nicolas Cage, Jason Reitman and Paul Schneider. (Alexander Payne was scheduled but didn’t show.)
Nic Cage following today’s “Edge of Humor” panel.
(l.) An Education‘s Carey Muligan and Fish Tank‘s Katie Jarvis. (Photo taken by Indiewire‘s Eugene Hernandez.)
Jeremy Piven‘s Speed-The-Plow/sushi defense debacle — a p.r. embarassment that will color Piven’s reputation for the rest of his life — has come to an official end. No more legal threats or fines or procedural hassles…done.
Variety‘s Gordon Cox reported this afternoon that independent arbitrator George Nicolau has found that the actor did not breach his employment contract with producers of Speed-the-Plow, the Broadway revival Piven that abruptly abandoned last December, blaming sushi poisoning.
Let me explain something. No one has ever believed and no one will ever believe Piven’s mercury-poisoning excuse for leaving that show. (It’s never been a secret about high mercury levels in raw fish, so what kind of moron consumes huge amounts of sushi and sashimi on a daily basis without understanding there will be a physical reaction?) Just as Robert Mitchum was never able to fully escape memories of the pot bust that landed him in jail in 1947, Piven will be regarded as Hollywood’s ruling sushi bullshit artist for the rest of his days.
Nicolau also exonerated Piven for having breached the collective bargaining contract between thesps’ union Actors’ Equity Association and the Broadway League, the trade association of legit producers and presenters. “While we respect the decision, we strongly disagree with it,” the Plow producers said in a statement.
For the next five days I’ve agreed to observe and report on the InFilm program, which bills itself as a kind of Hollywood education experience for high-end tourists. The InFilm people are looking to spread the word around, and I thought it might be interesting to learn perhaps a bit more about the visual effects industry, which is the focus of this week’s get-around.
Taking an InFilm program Hollywood tour costs between $2500 and $3000 a pop. I’ve never heard of an operation like this, but it’s the sort of thing I’d probably go for if I had money to burn and didn’t have the social and informational access to the film industry that’s part of my Hollywood Elsewhere day-to-day.
The InFilmers are figuring that $2500 to $3000 isn’t too much to pay for a classy film connoisseur’s experience — for people who really and truly care about movies the way others care about Catholicism or whatever. It’s an informational way to blow dough, in short, for particular people who don’t see themselves as run-of-the-mill tourists.
That said, I’m not sure that this morning’s activity — a visit to the Academy’s Margaret Herrick Library, where I spent hundreds of hours researching articles during my print journalism days of the ’80s and ’90s — is going to broaden my horizons.
But later today we’ll be dropping by Digital Domain, which I’ve never once visited in all my years in Los Angeles. On Tuesday we’ll be visiting Anatomorphex, and then Rhythm & Hues the following day. Visits to Legacy FX and Full Scale Effects will happen on Thursday.
Suite #310 at West Hollywood’s Le Parc hotel
I was introduced to the InFilm program by Brazilian film critic, scholar and educator Pablo Villaca, whom I’ve known on an online basis for a few years.
I ran into Pablo yesterday afternoon at the Le Parc hotel, where InFilm is putting us up, and since he’s never been here before I took him a ten-cent tour of West LA, Santa Monica, the Ocean Park beach area, Bel Air, Beverly Hills and West Hollywood.
Anyway, that’s the deal for the next five days — a high-end tour of the local FX industry. I’ll carve some time out here and there to file whatever, and I’m going to keep up with screenings and whatnot in the evenings.
23 or 24 minutes worth of 3-D Avatar footage were shown at Comic-Con this afternoon. And it should come as no surprise to report that this taste of James Cameron‘s 3-D action fantasy, set on a foreign planet and involving a primal conflict between militaristic humans and a race of ten-foot-tall aliens called Na’vi, played serious wowser. As in “Jesus, this is something…oh, wow!…crap, this is new…oh, that‘s cool…this is so friggin’ out there and vivid and real…love it all to hell.”
Cameron announced at the end of the presentation that the rest of the world will have a chance to sample Avatar in a similar way on Friday, August 21, which he called “Avatar Day.” On that day IMAX theatres coast to coast (and, I presume, in various foreign nations) will show about 15 minutes worth of 3-D IMAX footage of Avatar to the public for free. I guess the footage will be shown at successive shows all day and into the night, and that some kind of ticket reservations system will be set up.
20th Century Fox will open Avatar all over on 12.18.09.
The 3-D photography that I saw this afternoon is clean and needle-sharp and easy on the eyes, and the CG animation looks as realistic and organically genuine as anything anyone might imagine, and which certainly seems to represent the best we’ve seen thus far.
6,000 people watched the show inside the San Diego Convention Center’s great Hall H, and then sat for a brief but informative presentation by Cameron, producer Jon Landau and costars Zoe Saldana, Sigourney Weaver and Stephen Lang with a video apearance by costar Sam Worthington.
Cameron described the film as both a meditation on the wrongness of any effort by any military to conquer and suppress people in their native land, and a sci-fi adventure that will appeal to the proverbial 14 year-old boy in all of us. (Girls too.)
Set in the 22nd Century, Avatar (20th Century Fox, 12.18) is an allegory piece about militaristic/industrial-minded humans messing with and thinking about destroying a race of tall blue warrior aliens called Na’vi, who are peaceful unless attacked. In order to head off conflict between the Na’vi and the U.S. military, Weaver’s botanist character invents a technology that genetically engineers human/Na’vi hybrids, called Avatars.
The story involves a crippled Marine named Jake Sully (Worthington) volunteering to be transformed into an Avatar on Pandora in order to mingle with and understand the Na’vi. In so doing he falls in love with a Na’vi princess (Saldana) and gets all caught up in the conflict between her people and the bullshit U.S. military.
I was transported, blown away, melted down, reduced to adolescence, etc. I mean, I saw some truly great stuff.
But I need to share one thing. As drop-dead awesome and mind-blowing as Avatar is in terms of super-sophisticated CG animation — a realm that looks as real as anything sitting outside your window or on the next block or next continent — the bulk of it does appear to be happening in an all-animated world.
Which means that after the first-act, live-human footage (i.e., laying out the plot basics, preparation for the Na’vi transformation, etc.) the film seems to basically be a top-of-the-line animated action-thriller.
Which means that once the visual climate and atmosphere of animation begins to settle in, we’ll be watching something that’s cool but one step removed from a “real” world. Which means that for people like me, Avatar, beginning with the portion of the film in which the animation pretty much takes over, may not finally feel like a really solid and true-blue high-throttle experience because — yes, I realize this dates me — it lacks a certain biological completeness and trustworthiness.
To put it another way the visual dazzle element will be wondrous, but the trust element (a reference to Werner Herzog‘s statement about things have gotten to a point at which audiences don’t trust their eyes any more) will be in constant “hold.”
I’m saying this knowing, of course, that Avatar appears to do a truly amazing job of bridging the gulf between CG and reality, but for me hard-drive compositions will always be hard-drive compositions — they aren’t what God created on His/ Her own. And never the twain shall meet.
Here‘s Luke Y. Thompson‘s description of the Avatar footage on Deadline Hollywood Daily.
MSNBC switched over to high-def today, although it won’t show up on all the cable systems until early August. It kicked in with my provider, Century Cable, three days ago. So I tuned in this afternoon — channel 723 instead of the regular analog channel 23 — to see how good it looked, and it looked like hell. All pixellated and degraded — basically an analog image with a 16 x 9 aspect ratio. I know what the real thing looks like. This is crap.