Final Telluride photo of the day, snapped earlier this afternoon. The screenings at this much-beloved festival are finally beginning this evening. I for one am getting impatient. Will someone please review something…anything? I’ll settle for street talk, restaurant reviews, scenic descriptions.
I used to recreate with drugs (pot, hallucinogens, opiates) in my 20s, I had a vodka problem in the early to mid ’90s, and I had an alcoholic dad who passed along a good amount of emotional misery before joining AA in the mid ’70s, so I know a little something about substance-abuse pitfalls. Addiction is the banshee that could have taken me to hell but shrugged and gave me a “get out of jail” card instead. I was spared, grew past it, whatever…and yet there but for the grace of God.
I’ve therefore been very interested for some time in reading a forthcoming book by N.Y. Times columnist David Carr called The Night of The Gun, which is about his former life as a drug user and coke dealer (in the ’80s), and his struggles with alcohol addiction more recently.
Night of the Gun (Simon and Schuster) has an Amazon.com publishing date of August 8th.
I got the book yesterday and read most of it right away. If you know Carr’s media column or his Oscar-season writings as “the Bagger,” it should come as no surprise that it’s exquisitely written. I love Carr’s voice, which is at once flip and candid and yet elegant and wise. But the book is also a gripping, dead honest and well-reported confessional. And at the same time — no mean feat — dryly entertaining.
Night of the Gun is one of those “I did this and whoa…I’m not dead!” books, but of a much higher calibre. Much. Carr is a man of immense steel balls to have written this, and particularly to have gone back into the damp muddy tunnels of the past and fact-checked everything for three years. He did some 60 interviews with the witnesses and participants. He pored over the depressing documents (arrest reports, medical sheets) that all drug-users accumulate sooner or later. It must have revived nightmares. But Carr went and did it and bravely wrote this book, and did a bang-up job of it. Hat off, head bowed.
David Carr
Carr offers this succinct sum-up on page 16: “WHAT I DESERVED: Hepatitis C; federal prison time; HIV; a cold park bench; an early, addled death. WHAT I GOT: A nice house, a good job, three lovely children. WHAT I REMEMBER ABOUT HOW THAT GUY BECAME THIS GUY: Not much. Junkies don’t generally put stuff in boxes; they wear the boxes on their heads, so that everything around them — the sky, the future, the house down the street — is lost to them.”
A truly first-rate website has been put together to explain the book and the story and the whole thing. Tomorrow’s N.Y. Times magazine (in the 7.20 Sunday edition) will contain an excerpt from the book titled “Me and My Girls.”
Carr’s book reminded me of the “farewell, my dignity” aspect of drug use. Constant assaults on your self-esteem, stains on your sheets and your soul, humiliations unbridled. One way or another, if you do drugs you’re going to be dragged down and made to feel like a low-life animal. Because that’s what you are as long as you let drugs run the show.
Drugs didn’t exactly “run the show” when I was 22 or 23, but they sure were my friends. I saw my life as a series of necessary survival moves, spiritual door-openings, comic exploits, adventures, erotic intrigues — everything and anything that didn’t involve duty, drudgery, having a career and mowing the lawn on weekends. Pot, hashish, mescaline, peyote buttons, Jack Daniels and beer were my comrades in crime.
(I’m going to leave aside discussions of my Godhead Siddhartha discoveries with LSD, and I’d just as soon forget my relatively brief encounters with blithering idiot marching powder from the late ’70s to mid ’80s.)
The particular story that David Carr’s book brought back was me and my upper-middle-class friends’ flirtation with opium and, for a brief time, heroin. The way we saw it, smack was much hipper than your garden-variety head drugs. Opiates were more authentic, we figured, because guys like William S. Burroughs and Chet Baker did them. Where today I see only the danger, the depravity and the recklessness, back then we saw only the contra-coolness.
I was never much of a user, but I did flirt from time to time. I was a candy-ass in junkie circles because I confined myself to snorting and smoking the stuff. One thing I learned pretty quickly is that “chippers” (casual users) have to be careful because heroin will make you throw up if you smoke or snort too much because your body isn’t used to it. Which mine never was because I wasn’t…you know, dedicated.
I was living in a crash pad in Southport, Connecticut. My sole source of income at the time was working part-time for a guy who ran a limousine driver service. Business guys looking to go to Kennedy or LaGuardia or Newark airports would call and I’d come over and drive them to the airport in their car, and then drive it back to their home. Doesn’t sound like much of an idea, but there were definitely customers calling from Westport, Weston, Easton, Wilton, Georgetown, Redding, Southport and Fairfield.
My deal with my boss, Peter, was to be on call at all times. A guy leaving for the airport in a couple of hours would call Peter, he’d call me, I’d drive over and so on. So one afternoon — a Sunday, possibly — a friend and I happened to have some of that snort-smoke stuff, and had retired to a barn out back for a little indulgence. We rolled a nice fat joint and soon I was royally Baker-ed. But just as we got back to the house the phone rang. It was Peter telling me to dress nicely and be at a certain client’s home in 45 minutes if possible, certainly no later than an hour. A trip down to Kennedy.
If I were less of a fool I would have said then and there, “Sorry, Peter — no can do.” But I was broke and needed the money. Go for it, I told myself. I figured I’d take a quick shower, change into a dress shirt and sport jacket, and be relatively straight by the time I got to the client’s house. But the shower didn’t help and I looked like a wreck. My pupils were little black micro-points. So I put on a pair of deep-black shades and then had the inspiration to put on a cowboy hat, the idea being that the manly-conservative cowboy vibe might rub off and make me look less drugged out.
But I was feeling way too wasted as I got into my car so I got my friend to drive me over in his. I figured the stuff would wear off sooner or later and I’d be okay.
I started to feel more and more nauseous as we drove over. When I realized with a jolt I was going to be sick, I rolled down the window and lurched halfway out and spewed. Except we were moving at a good clip — 40 or 45 mph — and so the vomit splattered along the side of my friend’s bright red car.
You need to imagine yourself raking leaves on the front lawn of your beautiful Southport home, blue sky, your toddlers playing nearby, birds chirping in the trees, when all of a sudden you see this ratty red Impala rolling along with some guy leaning out the passenger window and spraying clam chowder. You have to think of it in those terms.
It was all we could do to keep the client from calling the police once he saw me — pasty-faced, straw cowboy hat, unable to stand straight, slurring my words, flecks of vomit on my sport jacket. I was screamed at and, of course, fired by Peter. Never before had I felt like such a piece of detritus, and nothing has happened since to equal this. It was so humiliating that the opiate-usage thing ended very soon after. I told myself I was the rebellious but capable son of suburban middle- class parents who led productive, organized, reasonably moral lives, and here I was acting like a complete degenerate.
The purple rage on Peter’s face, the look of contempt in the client’s eyes, my own self disgust. If these things didn’t wake me, nothing would have. But they did.
Thursday’s tracking predicted that WALL*E would $50 to $60 million this weekend. Well, it made $23.1 million last night and is looking at $66,441,000 by Sunday night. Handicappers will have to consider next weekend’s numbers (remember that woman at my Disney lot screening who said she was bored?) for a long-range projection, but it’s sure to at least end up in the $200 million-plus realm. A friend went to a commercial screening early yesterday afternoon and saw “plenty of kids but also a lot of adults on their own.”
Wanted — Jesus wept! — did $18,700,000 last night and will end up with $52,500,000 for the weekend. It was supposed to do somewhere over $30 million but not more than $40 million, according to Thursday’s tracking. Just goes to show that among younger males, the appetite for brutish ultra-violent degeneracy is alive and thriving. “Are there really adults who want to sit through this kind of mindless, bullying mayhem?” wrote the Austin Chronicle‘s Josh Rosenblatt. “Maybe I don’t want to know the answer to that one.” Sorry to be the bearer.
Get Smart‘s 2nd week will result in $20,500,000 by Sunday night — a 47% drop. Kung Fu Panda got hit by WALL*E, will do $11.7 million by Sunday night. The cume is $179.3 million, but it’s doing $3 thousand a print now and it may not make the $200 millon mark, although a $1,900,000 tally looks safe.
The Incredible Hulk will do $9.1 million for the weekend for a cume of $115 million. It’s down to $2700 a print, might squeak out another $10 million for a final figure of $125 million. Ang Lee’s Hulk did $132,177,234 at the end of the day, but then ticket prices weren’t as high five years ago.
The Love Guru died last weekend when it opened so it doesn’t matter, and this weekend it’s off 58% — $5,800,000
Indy 4 will do $4.984,000 this weekend for a cume of $299,890,000 — $110 thousand away from $300 million mark. Watch the Paramount guys goose the ads this weekend
SATC will do $3.729 million and The Happening is $3.712 million. The latter will be barely over $60 million at the end of the road. Adam Sandler’s You Don’t Mess with the Zohan will make $3.2 million. It’s currently above $90 million but down to $1400 a print and almost out of the theaters — it’s be a push to $100 million.
Iron Man will make $2.2 million by Sunday night.
Kitt Kittredge dropped 68% Friday-to-Friday in its 2nd platform week (i.e., five theatres), and will experience a 54% drop for the weekend. That obviously suggests big trouble when it goes into national release mode.
Covering yesterday’s farewell-and-thank you party thrown by Hillary Clinton for campaign workers, N.Y. Daily News reporters Kenneth R. Bazinet and Michael McAuliff have described “tears and hugs and lingering bitterness that will take some time to heal among Clinton’s soon-to-be-unemployed foot soldiers.” They’ve also run an astonishing kicker quote — an anonymous “campaign aide” saying, “I will never forgive Obama for what he did to Hillary…I will vote for him, but that’s it.”
What do you say to such a statement? Do you say, “Yeah, I hear you…Obama played it low and dirty while Hillary held high the torch of dignity and appealed to the best in voters”? What kind of prescribed medication do you have to be on to buy into this?
Trust me — in her noon speech today in Washington, D.C., Clinton’s carefully parsed words will provide comfort to the person who voiced the above. Clinton’s heart-of-hearts is not in this charade — we all know that. Many of her rabid supporters regard today’s concession speech as a kind of funeral. She’s something of a political realist, of course, and knows what she has to do, but many of us will be flabbergasted if she convinces everyone that she really and truly means what she’s about to “say.”
We all know who and what she is — do we not?
N.Y. Times reporter Jodi Kantor has offered a more carefully measured view of the situation.
Frank Pierson‘s King of the Gypsies, which is out today on DVD, is a fairly difficult film to sit through. It’s a stab at trying to give a Godfather-like treatment to gypsy culture, and there’s just no believing it. While it “isn’t the worst film of the year,” said N.Y. Times critic Vincent Canby in his 12.20.78 review, “the gypsies should sue.”
Degraded Polaroid photo of King of the Gypsies star Sterling Hayden and journalist during filming in late ’77 (or was it early ’78?) at Manhattan’s Plaza hotel.
But the film carries a special memory for me, however, as I managed an interview with star Sterling Hayden during filming in Manhattan in late ’77. Hayden, who lived in my home town of Wilton, Connecticut, and whom I knew faintly because of this, was the first “name” guy I ever sat down with for a piece.
A good actor but an even better writer, eloquent and blustery, and a “bothered” malcontent from way back, Hayden — 62 at the time — was a tall, bearded Zeus-like figure, and one of the first bohemian-minded older guys I’d had the pleasure of slightly knowing.
He liked being the ornery old rebel, and was fairly open to hanging with younger fans like myself. I visited his Wilton home two or three times to listen and learn and shoot the shit. (It helped that I knew all of his films, and had strong opinions about his best performances.) I never got high with Hayden, but I knew a couple of Wilton guys who told me they did. Hash, they said.
Hayden had some legendary problems with the bottle. He wasn’t all that different from Roger Wade, the alcoholic writer he portrayed in Robert Altman‘s The Long Goodbye. (Hayden was less bitter.) He would do rehab and fasting from time to time. I remember him saying once that fasting “is the precise opposite of debauch…the hard thing is to hold that middle ground, hold that middle ground.”
My King of the Gypsies interview with Hayden took place in a hotel room at the Plaza hotel, where filming was happening that day. It was sometime in the mid-afternoon, and I remember that he downed a couple of large glasses of Johnnie Walker Red over a two hour period. Hayden wasn’t much of a give-and-taker. He was the Great Man who’d been through it all, knew it all and had a lot to say. It was all about feeding him set-up lines and and letting nature takes its course.
He told me that producer Dino de Laurentiis had given him a copy of Lorenzo Semple, Jr.‘s script of Hurricane, in hopes that Hayden would agree to costar. When De Laurentiis asked what he thought, Hayden said (or so he told me), “I gotta tell ya — I think it’s crap!” Bristling, De Laurentiis replied, “You’re the first person who’s said that!” A day or two later Hayden talked to a De Laurentiis development guy who said, “Naahh…you’re not the first.”
The best moment of our interview happened when Hayden began speaking of his farmer role in Bernardo Bertolucci‘s 1900. He said that Bertolucci had let him write his own dialogue, and was proud of a line he’d written for his death scene. I knew it and said it before he did — “I’ve always loved the wind.” Talk about a bonding moment.
There is nothing wrong or suspect about liking a film that almost everyone else hates. On the contrary, it is the mark of a critic who’s probably worth reading …as long as he/she doesn’t go all Armond White on disliked or discredited films too often. That said, it’s a bit of an eye-opener (or is it a dark omen?) that MCN’s David Poland has given a fairly hearty thumbs-up to Speed Racer (Warner Bros., 5.9)
With tracking looking dicey at best and a Rotten Tomatoes positive rating of 37% (as of Wednesday afternoon), this animated Wachowski brothers action film needs all the friends it can get. I do know that Poland has been totally in the Wachowski tank from the beginning, and that his enthusiastic and persistent praise for both The Matrix Reloaded and The Matrix Revolutions were divorced from the reality of those films that I came to know. (Yes, I was warm on Reloaded at first, but it faded upon reflection and then the curtains parted when I saw it a second time.)
For all I know Poland is on the money, and again, he has my respect for going against the grain. That said, I had a much better time (as I frequently do) reading Anthony Lane‘s New Yorker review, particularly this opening paragraph:
“Gluttons for Duck Soup will remember the scene in which Groucho is faced with an official document. ‘Why, a four-year-old child could understand this report,’ he says. ‘Run out and find me a four-year-old child.’ My sentiments exactly, as I sat in a cathedral-size auditorium, wreathed in the ineffable mysteries of Speed Racer. This is the latest offering from Andy and Larry Wachowski, bringers of The Matrix, and, if it is about anything, it is about the quest to overwhelm a particular stratum of the masses. A four-year-old will be reduced to a gibbering but highly gratified wreck; an eight-year-old will wander around wearing a look that was last seen on the face of Dante after he met Beatrice. But what about the rest of us? True, our eyeballs will slowly, though never completely, recover, but what of our souls?
“I reckon the M.P.A.A. should use the advent of Speed Racer to revive an old ratings symbol: a big Roman X, meaning ‘of no conceivable interest to anyone over the age of ten.'”
As it must to all men, death came today to the great Jules Dassin at age 96. A Greek-descended, Hollywood-employed, highly-rated noir director, Dassin was blacklisted in 1949 only to bounce back with Rififi (’55), the greatest heist film ever made. (Rififi was actually released in France in ’54.)
The Paris-based melodrama re-ignited Dassin’s career and led to subsequent hits such as He Who Must Die (’57), the lightly comedic heist film Topkapi (’64), Phaedra (’62),and the legendary Never on Sunday (’60). He also directed Uptight (’68 — a Harlem-based remake of John Ford‘s The Informer), Promise at Dawn (’70), The Rehearsal (’74) and Circle of Two (’80).
Dassin’s noteworthy Hollywood-era films include Brute Force (’47), The Naked City (’48) and Night and the City (’50). Forget noteworthy — these three are essential if you haven’t yet seen them.
I’ll forever be grateful for having attended Dassin’s special visit to the L.A. County Museum of Art in 2004, during which he spoke on-stage for about 90 minutes before a screening of Rififi. A 40-minute video of that visit can be found on the Criterion Collection’s 2007 DVD of The Naked City.
Jules Dassin
One of Dassin’s more ardent admirers was Alexander Payne, who felt a kinship based on their common Greek heritage. Payne told me this afternoon that he recently lobbied for Dassin to be given a special honorary Oscar from the Academy, but it was no-go.
In view of the Academy having given a politically controversial honorary Oscar to Elia Kazan, who was despised in some corners for having named (or confirmed) names to HUAC, Payne feels “it would have been nice for the Academy to have acknowledged both sides of that very difficult coin — a director who stayed, and another who was forced to leave.”
Dassin was married to Greek actress Melina Mercouri until her death in 1994. He was a very wise, charming and elegant man, to judge from his comments during the LACMA interview. He deserves some kind of special posthumous tribute on next year’s Oscar show, considering how the Hollywood community came close to ruining Dassin’s life during his creative prime.
This is a non-movie story, and if that’s not to your liking, tough. A Catholic service is being held for my recently deceased sister Laura on Tuesday, 3.15, in Southport, Connecticut. I can’t be there so I decided to write a little remembrance, which somebody will hopefully read to the congregation. I tapped it out this morning:
When she was young, before her mid-teen years, my sister Laura was very much in the game. She had a high IQ — higher than mine, I recently learned — and was quick and alert. She told and got jokes, and was animated, energetic, playful and full of pep. She had a wonderful laugh and had, until the end of her life, the most beautiful smile I’ve ever seen.
As a young girl she was sometimes feisty and scrappy. One of my vivid early memories is coming home from elementary school one afternoon (I was in the first or second grade) and telling my mother, who was lying on her bed, about something good that had happened — a good grade, a pat on the back from my teacher, something along these lines — and Laura, who was standing next to my mother’s bed, saying, “So what?”
My mother rebuked her, angrily, but what Laura said was the mark of a sharp, spunky, intelligent and competitive person. She’d listened to my classroom story and decided it was unexciting or unremarkable or inane, and, consistent with the nature of all young siblings who want to put their sisters or brothers in their place, instantly voiced a disapproving judgment.
I was never as close to Laura, then or later in life, as was Tony, our younger brother, but I’ve never forgotten this impression of her — a girl who had opinions and gumption and intelligent judgment to spare, and who gave as good as she got.
Sadly, that side of Laura never matured, much less developed. She became afflicted in her mid-teen years with schizophrenia and never left the ground, much less spread her wings. Most of her life, sadly, was about coping, about holding on as best she could and getting by with a measure of dignity. She lived in her heart and her mind, but not, truth be told, very much in the present.
A few days ago I heard a writer or journalist of some distinction (I forget his name) say that Ireland wasn’t about the present or the future, but about the past, over and over. As she got older, that was Laura through and through.
She was occasionally a scrappy, sometimes contentious person, but she was mostly quiet and gentle and meditative. She had a good heart, which is to say a better heart than mine. She cared deeply about spiritual matters, and one aspect of this is that she became a Catholic, as I recall, sometime near the start of this century. Her day-to-day life was about what she could do within the margins of her affliction, a cruel hand that was dealt to her at birth, but her inner life was sometimes enormous and deep and radiant.
Laura and I shared a trip to Europe in the early summer of ’03. I picked her up at Nice Airport during the closing days of the Cannes Film Festival. The next day Laura came to a screening with me of Clint Eastwood‘s Mystic River, which showed at the Grand Palais. The next day we rented a car and drove east and southeast into Italy, and then to a small town in Tuscany called San Donato. The proprietor of the b & b where Laura and I stayed for two or three nights is a woman named Elisa Prati, who chatted with Laura a lot and loved her company. In the years since (I’ve written Elisa often and stayed there last year with my son, Jett), she has asked me how Laura is, and has said more than once what a beautiful person she is.
During our stay in San Donato Laura and I went to an outdoor backyard dinner — about 8 in the evening — at the home of an Italian chef named Matthias Pommer. There were six or seven of us, and candles on the table and the sound of crickets and a wonderful earthy aroma from the nearby vineyards. That moment was probably the most peaceful and settled and serene of our entire Italian visit.
For the truth is that Laura, despite the wonder of our being in Italy and experiencing all these new sights and flavors and absorbing all that culture and history, spent about a quarter of her time there — our time in the car mostly — going over her problems and unresolved feelings about her life, mostly about things that had been hurtful or gone wrong for her in her teens and 20s
The second best moment — or perhaps the best moment of all — happened in Rome, when Laura was sitting behind me on a dark blue scooter as we drove all through the city, sometimes getting lost but eventually finding our way, zooming around the Collisseum and through the Villa Borghese and all the campos and piazzas. As we started out I remember speeding along the main throroughfare that ran along the Tiber river, and hearing Laura going “woo!” as we went under a bridge.
We stayed on that road for two or three miles, and then we turned left on a bridge and crossed over the Tiber and turned left again to head back to the center of the city. And all of a sudden we saw Vatican City on our right and Laura said, “Jeff, Jeff…the Vatican! There’s St. Peter’s!” I pulled over and we decided then and there that Laura would visit the Vatican and the Sistine Chapel on her own and that I would return to pick her up at this very spot, three hours later. And she took off on foot and I pulled back into traffic.
As I rode along I smiled about the reemergence of the old Laura. A sharp, spunky, intelligent woman who’d seen the Vatican out of the corner of her eye and decided right then and there. A woman of gumption, vision and intelligence who knew what she wanted, made a quick judgment for the better, and who gave back to Rome as good as she got.
Stanley Kubrick “died almost exactly nine years ago and his shadow still looms large over cinema,” says the Guardian’s Andrew Pulver. “For me, Kubrick’s central achievement is a still unmatched 10-film run of masterpieces, between 1955’s Killer’s Kiss and 1987’s Full Metal Jacket. No other director — not Ford, Scorsese, Truffaut or Fellini — has such a strike rate, and it’s even less likely that someone will ever again produce cutting-edge work in four consecutive decades.
“In my opinion — and it is only an opinion — I only discount Spartacus which, though ambitious, is dated and kitschy, and his final film, Eyes Wide Shut.
“It was to introduce the latter film that Kubrick’s producer (and brother-in-law) Jan Harlan came to London to participate in the Barbican cinema’s ‘Stanley Kubrick 2008: A Film Odyssey’ screening program. I saw Eyes Wide Shut when it was released and felt it was the work of someone well past their prime; I saw it again at the Barbican last week and while I can now appreciate its dream structure and Freudian investigation of the subconscious a little more, it still seems a bafflingly obvious meditation on deceit. Can Kubrick really, as Harlan told us, have considered it his supreme artistic achievement?”
On a scene-by-scene basis, Eyes Wide Shut has always been — will always be — a kind of vacuum cleaner. Turn it on, watch it for three or four minutes and it sucks you in. Like all of Kubrick’s films. Even though it may be the least of them. Which, I agree, it probably is.
I remember reporting nine years ago about the moment when EWS came crashing down the general public. It was at an afternoon screening in Mann’s Chinese. The lord high master of the orgy asks Tom Cruise what the password is. “Fidelio,” Cruise says. “Yes,” the poobah replies, “but what is the password for the house?” And some guy in the 22nd row at the Chinese yelled out “bullshit!”
“Something strange happened the other day. All these different people — friends, co-workers, relatives, people on a liberal e-mail list I read — kept saying the same thing: They’ve suddenly developed a disdain for Bill and Hillary Clinton. Maybe this is just a coincidence, but I think we’ve reached an irrevocable turning point in liberal opinion of the Clintons.
“The sentiment seems to be concentrated among Barack Obama supporters. Going into the campaign, most of us liked Hillary Clinton just fine, but the fact that tens of millions of Americans are seized with irrational loathing for her suggested that she might not be a good Democratic nominee. But now that loathing seems a lot less irrational. We’re not frothing Clinton haters like…well, name pretty much any conservative. We just really wish they’d go away.” — Jonathan Chait, a contributing editor to L.A. Times‘ “Opinion” and a senior editor at the New Republic, in a 1.26 article.
I used to hate Hillary but love or least greatly enjoy Bill. Now that they’ve (apparently) succeeded in downgrading the Democratic presidential primary race into a race referendum, in thoroughly putrifying this race compared to what it all felt like 23 days ago, I really and truly despise both of them. If I could find it in my head or my heart to vote for McCain or Romney in the general election, I would do just to spite Clinton (presuming she wins the nomination, which seems likely given the leads she has over Obamain California and NewYork due to the wide support she has among traditional older Democrats and particularly older women). But I can’t vote for McCain (not with his Iraq War suppport) or Romney, and this choice makes me miserable.
Everyone is going to spin Obama’s almost certain South Carolina victory today as a racially-driven and nothing more. The Clintons and their disgusting surrogates have colored this race over the last three weeks, and damn them to hell for doing this.
Here’s a portion of a Peggy Noonan piece that appeared in the Wall Street Journal on 1.25: “Bill Clinton, with his trembly, red-faced rage, makes John McCain look young. His divisive and destructive daily comportment — this is a former president of the United States — is a civic embarrassment. It is also an education, and there is something heartening in this.
“There are many serious and thoughtful liberals and Democrats who support Barack Obama and John Edwards, and who are seeing Mr. Clinton in a new way and saying so. Here is William Greider in The Nation, the venerable left-liberal magazine. The Clintons are ‘high minded’ on the surface but ‘smarmily duplicitous underneath, meanwhile jabbing hard at the groin area. They are a slippery pair and come as a package. The nation is at fair risk of getting them back in the White House for four years.’
“That, again, is from one of the premier liberal journals in the United States. It is exactly what conservatives have been saying for a decade. This may mark a certain coming together of the thoughtful on both sides. The Clintons, uniters at last.”
The Sundance Film Festival is a 10-day event, but it’s always over as of Wednesday morning, or five and a half days after the opening-night festivities on Thursday night. The voltage turns down, there are fewer people on Main Street, all the presumably hot titles (i.e., name casts, advance-hyped) have been screened. I was going to stay until Friday but with this virus in my system and the general enervation and lack of excitement I’m figuring “screw it.” I’m on the phone to Southwest right now, get myself on a plane tomorrow morning.
Sundance ’08 wasn’t bad but it sure wasn’t great. There was a general feeling of deflation, an almost-but-not-quite vibe. There was no surprise knockout…no Little Miss Sunshine, no Once. Film after film seemed to fall short in this or that way. More than a few were greeted with “respectful but tepid applause,” to quote a college film professor who had just come from The Mysteries of Pittsburgh. Nobody except Variety‘s Bob Koehler came up to me and said, “You have to see this film!” Over and over I heard qualifiers — “not bad,” “I was okay with it,” “Almost worked,” “didn’t blow my socks off,” etc.
I saw five films that I was genuinely aroused and moved by — In Bruges, Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired, Patti Smith: Dream of Life, Dog Eat Dog (Perro Come Perro) and The Escapist. Everything else was a half-and-halfer, a “meh” or an outright dud.
I admired the pared-down, Lars von Trier-like atmosphere of Lance Hammer‘s Ballast, which I saw the day before yesterday, but I also found it draggy and almost comatose at times. There were something like 15 movies here that dealt with suicide. I only saw the beginning of American Teen, which Paramount Vantage is apparently buying, but I was instantly bored by its focus on four cliched high-school archetypes.
I missed tons of films. That’s normal, of course. You can’t possibly see everything you want to see. I play it like anyone else, starting out with my own list and ready to shift gears any time I hear about a really special film. But with very few exceptions, all I heard about were films that vaguely disappointed. Or I passed along the bad news myself. Barry Levinson‘s What Just Happened? never connected for me — wasn’t believable, lacked heart, emotionally aloof characters. I was mostly “meh” with Mark Pellington‘s Henry Poole Is Here as it struck me as overly gloomy and enervated. And so on.
I should have seen Choke, Hamlet 2 and Sleepwalking. Getting sick yesterday and being sick today is my best excuse. The virus just took over, although I managed to bang out a few Oscar nomination reactions. I was sleeping on a couch when a friend called in the mid-afternoon about the death of Heath Ledger, so I got up and tapped out an okay-this-happened piece. Then I crashed again.
I have to get out of here. I want only to escape. I just want to leave it all behind and start over in warmer weather.
First-time filmmaker Lance Hammer‘s Ballast, which I’ll try to catch at the Monday noon Eccles screening, has gotten more “you need to see this” buzz than any other Sundance film thus far. Consider this excerpt from Robert Koehler‘s 1.19.08 Variety review.
“A rock-ribbed sense of committed, personal cinema and a core belief in people being able to pull themselves out of misery supports Ballast, an extraordinary debut by editor-writer-director Lance Hammer. Though his name would be better suited to sign high-octane action movies, Hammer quickly establishes himself with the only film he’s ever made as a humanist artist working confidently and quietly with the cinema’s most basic and expressive tools.
“Following a Mississippi Delta family shattered by suicide and violence, pic runs a course from wrenching death to possible uplift that seems real every second, but will prove a challenge to potential distribs even while winning over fests worldwide.
“A rare case of a Sundance competition film also in the running at Berlin, such a one-two punch suggests a notable work, but also perhaps creates inflated expectations, even though unknowns are involved on both sides of the camera. Hammer’s achievement is to create a thoroughly engrossing experience that attends to everyday life’s small (and in a few cases, significant) moments, and is certain to command high respect as a film that operates by its principles and engages audiences’ best human responses.”
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