Seeing three movies today — John Dahl‘s You Kill Me at 11 am, a high-expectation fall release drama at 2 pm, and Danny Boyle‘s Sunshine at 7:30 pm — so I’ll be out of commission for a while. I’ll try and post some stuff in the late afternoon.
I played hookie from Cinevegas yesterday afternoon by sneaking into a regular-ass commercial screening of Mr. Brooks, the Kevin Costner murder thriller that has managed a mere 55% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes.
William Hurt, Kevin Costner in Mr. Brooks
I agree with the naysaying 45% that director and co-writer Bruce A. Evans has succumbed to overly dense plotting, and that he totally blows it at the very end (I instantly got up and walked when the “final thing” happens), but I never wanted to leave before that. Mr. Brooks is compulsively watchable, and more enjoyable than I expected. Plus it features Costner’s most intriguing performance since Open Range, and it delivers another exquisite supporting turn by William Hurt, who can do no wrong these days.
Set in Portland, Oregon, it’s about a multi-millonaire named Earl Brooks has a secret addiction to murder. Like a guy with a latent drinking problem who can’t stick to sobriety, every so often Brooks falls off the wagon and goes out and claims a victim, feeling immensely satisfied during the act but reverting into a total guilt mode in the aftermath.
Hurt plays Marshall, his alter ego. Marshall is the madness but also the brains of the operation — the guy who lusts for the thrill of of it all but is also very smart in figuring how not to get pinched. The scenes between Costner and Hurt are worth the price of admission alone — relaxed, subtle, assured, even comforting. That sounds a bit weird, I realize, but it’s nice to have a shrewd partner in life who grins a lot and enjoys a good verbal spar.
New Yorker critic David Denby says it beautifully in his review: “Marshall is a roguish wit, seductive and amused, who knows that he√ɬ¢√¢‚Äö¬¨√¢‚Äû¬¢s being unreasonable but presses his needs anyway. Once satisfied, he becomes the ultimate kibbitzer. Tucking in his jaw and alternating irony, sarcasm, and mockery, Hurt hits one spinning serve after another, and Costner hits them right back at him. The two have a fine time, as if they had been doing this routine for years.”
For my money (even though I didn’t pay), Mr. Brooks is a nicely absorbing, easygoing piece of high-toned junk, and yet it never put me through any kind of pain. Until the end, that is, and, like I said, I didn’t even deal with it. I just bolted. I don’t want to deal with it now. It’s not worthy of my attention.
The secondary characters are a bit of a problem — an angry grungy creep (Dane Cook) who blackmails Brooks into being taken along on his next killing, and an angry glaring detective (Demi Moore) who’s determined to identify and bust the “thumbprint killer” (i.e. Brooks). They’re both bothersome because their obsessive behavior is snippy and unlikable. I was hoping that both would be killed, and in this respect I was only half-satisfied at the end.
A third supporting character, Brooks√ɬ¢√¢‚Äö¬¨√¢‚Äû¬¢s college-age daughter (Danielle Panabaker), could have been dropped altogether and the film would’ve been fine. She doesn’t do anything except tease and frustrate.
Computer trauma update: It’s 3:35 pm on a beautiful blue-sky day, and after almost 24 hours of high anxiety I’m almost out of the woods. I came to my senses last night and realized that buying a brand new computer simply because the hard drive had crapped out was ridiculous. (Thanks to those who stated this in the reader replies.) I obviously wasn’t thinking clearly yesterday. All I was saying to everyone was, “I have to fix this problem fast.”
I found a Brooklyn-based computer repair guy named Marcel (his company is called Big Island Interactive) on Craig’s List around 8 ayem this morning. He told me to just bring over the old unit plus a new hard drive (in case he couldn’t repair the malfunctioning one) and a fresh copy of Windows XP (in case the old Windows data is irrevocably screwed up) to his brownstone apartment on Park Place in the Park Slope area.
So I went back to the Best Buy store on B’way and Houston around 10:30, returned the new computer (Windows Vista is a little twitchy…I played around with it last night), picked up the old one, went uptown to buy a new hard drive and a fresh Windows XP disc, hopped on the Q train and delivered everything to Marcel around 2 pm. A hour later he called and said he might be able to repair the old hard drive — he’ll know more by this evening.
I’m now sitting in a combination post-office and internet cafe near the corner of Flatbush Ave. and Park Place. God willing, the troubles will be over by midday tomorrow.
There’s not much time to file before I have to get back on the Q train and catch a screening of 28 Weeks Later at 6 pm. I recorded an interview with the film’s director Juan Carlos Fresnadillo yesterday afternoon, just before that Spider-Man 3 screening at Leows’ Lincoln Plaza that I didn’t attend because of those wonderful tekkies at Gateway. Maybe I can post this if I can find another decent internet cafe after the screening.
There’s a Friedrich_Nietzsche line that Nick Nolte‘s character says in Karl Reicz‘s Who’ll Stop The Rain?: “When in danger, always move forward.”
The San Francisco Film Festival gave a forum yesterday to theatre director, opera-creator and impresario Peter Sellars to deliver a “State of Cinema” address inside a large theatre at the Kabuki 8 plex. Sellars is a man who lives in his own mystical-energy field and within his own ecclesiastical realm, but who sees and shares everything from within it. It was a stirring, touching, soul-lifting thing to sit in the fourth row and just absorb every brilliant thought, whether you agreed with every last word or not.
Peter Sellars during yesterday afternoon’s speech at the Kabuki 8 — Sunday, 4.29.07, 4:35 pm
I recorded most of what he said, in two sessions. Here’s the second part. The sound is low and it would be best to listen with headphones, but this will give you an idea of what it was like.
What did Sellars say? That deliberately cruel and heartless things are inflicted upon the poor by the well-to-do, and that film is perhaps best considered as an agent of consciousness-raising and social change, and that art’s highest function is to prepare the public for what is possible, even if it may seem impossible at the time.
Sellars is professor of World Arts and Culture at U.C.L.A., where he teaches “Art as Social Action” and “Art as Moral Action.” Yesterday’s talk was an extension or expression of these themes.
At one point in discussing some institutional cruelty Sellars began to weep, and although I wasn’t feeling the moral outrage as acutely as he was I was moved by that fact that he was feeling it and then some — his emotionalism is one serious torch. Immense artistic accomplishments, worldwide respect, orange shirt, blue beads, spikey hair, Harvard education…the man is a trip.
Sellars talked a lot about the last year of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and what he was really consumed with as his life drew to a close, and that this was far more fascinating than the “frat-boy ” shenanigans that Milos Forman and Anthony Shaffer’s Amadeus depicted.
Again, here’s a 22-minute portion of what he said.
Ten minutes into watching Stephanie Daley, I was experiencing that “okay, don’t worry, this is going to be very good” realization. But I was also feeling slightly on-edge because I wanted this moody, expertly realized drama to stay on-track and build and dig in and deepen and so on. And it did that. And the performances were killer. And then came the ending, which, to me, felt a little too ambiguous and a touch sudden, as in “wait…that’s it?”
Endings are very, very important — you could argue that they’re almost the whole ball game — but Stephanie Daley is still one of the best solemn-and-sober women’s films I’ve seen in a long, long while. It is absolutely worth seeing on a Saturday or Sunday afternoon, or on a weeknight. It will not make you groan or slump in your seat, and the notion of checking messages on your Blackberry in the second act will most likely not come up.
I’m forecasting these reactions because Amber Tamblyn‘s performance as the title character — a 17 year-old high-school junior who may have murdered her baby — is awfully damn good. I’m not using the word “astonishing” because Tamblyn looks and behaves like any young girl with issues pressing on her heart and mind, but “exceptional” definitely applies. It’s almost all in her eyes — a haunted, gloom- ridden, terrified emotional state — and yet she’s immensely watchable, attractively so, every second she’s on-screen. I could call her performance ravishing, but I wouldn’t mean erotically. Talk about a face trying to hide surging currents…
15 months ago I wrote that Tamblyn “is now on the Big Map because of this film.” I added that “it’s too bad after giving such a finely textured dig-deep performance in Daley that she’s agreed to star in the lowballing Grudge 2, but I don’t think this matters. Millions have seen Grudge 2 in theatres and on the screen — a much smaller group will wind up seeing Stephanie Daley, but those who do will not feel in the least bit burned or toyed or fiddled with. It’s all in the mind of the beholder, and it’s a free country.
Stephanie Daley is basically saying that the acts of procreation and giving birth weigh heavily on the soul, and are not to be even considered by kids who are way too young and unable to handle the burdens. The right-to-lifers are going to get hold of this film when it comes out on DVD and show it to high-school kids. It plays right into their view of things, and honestly? I found myself acknowledging as I watched it that the right-to-lifers have a point.
As the film begins the infant death has been discovered and Daley has been saying it was unintentional — that the infant was still-born. The newspapers have been calling her the “ski mom” because she gave birth to — unloaded — a 26 week-old fetus in a bathroom during a school ski trip, and the baby was later found dead in a garbage can.
Enter Lydie Crane (Tilda Swinton), a psychologist assigned to interview Steph- anie and advise the authorities whether or not she should be prosecuted. Crane herself is five months pregnant with a shaky marriage to a guy played by Tim Hutton giving her pause and some grief. (Except for anomalies like The Last Mimzy, it is axiomatic that all relationships with all characters played by Tim Hutton, rumored to be a Charlie Sheen-type hound in real life, are shaky — he has a face that says “alcoholic” and “likely to tomcat around given half a chance.”) Plus she gave birth to a stillborn child a year or so earlier.
This sounds like one of those only-in-the-movies set-ups, but it didn’t feel like a speed bump to me. Such is the level of craft and assurance that Brougher brings to Stephanie Daley. There’s also the beautiful photography by David Rush Morrison, and a kind of smooth painterly quality that seems to transform the innate gloominess of the material into something much more.
The plot isn’t stunningly original, but then again what is? Norman Jewison‘s Agnes of God (1985) was fairly similar, with Jane Fonda playing the older psychologist-investigator and Meg Tilley as a young nun who’d given birth and possibly killed the child. There’s also a 2004 novel by Jodie Picoult called Plain Truth, which is about a young Amish girl accused of killing her baby, and is also about a female lawyer with issues of her own who is assigned to look into the case.
Distributors were naturally scared by the baby-killing aspect, but First Look’s Ruth Vitale stepped up and entered into negotiations with the Stephanie Daley team out of Sundance ’06. But then “the deal got worse and worse” (or so says a person involved in the negotiations), apparently due to someone at First Look not liking the film as much as Vitale, and it all fell apart. Then Regent Releasing, lowballers who open films mainly to promote DVD traffic, stepped in.
Stephanie Daley has an 84% positive rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Salon‘s Andrew O’Hehir, a heavyweight critic, has called it “a major American film, announcing the arrival of an independent director who deserves all the hype.” Tamblyn won the Best Actress award at last summer’s Locarno Film Festival. Brougher won the Best Director award at the Jackson Hole Film Festival. It’s a woman’s film, sure, but the way-above-average pedigree should snag the attention of any half-serious filmgoer.
It’s now playing at Manhattan’s Angelika (subway sounds rumbling up from the floorboards!), and will open on 4.27 in Los Angeles at the Regent theatre — the stand-alone on La Brea, just south of Melrose. Daley will open on 5.11 in Boston, 5.25 in San Francisco, 6.1 in Chicago, 6.29 in Denver and yaddah-yaddah.
I’ve been waiting to read some definitive article in a mainstream publication that repeats what I’m hearing from the guys at West L.A.’s Laser Blazer, and which has been reported on various industry and gamer sites, which is that Blu-ray has surged ahead of HD-DVD and that the aroma of absolute victory is in the air, like the scent of burning leaves on a late-fall afternoon.
Has there been a clear-cut game-is-over, Blu-ray-has-won story in any major publication (Variety, N.Y. Times, Wired, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post) over the last couple of months that I’ve missed? New York Post critic Lou Lumenick has passed along a 3.8.07 story (exactly two weeks ago) that addresses this trend
The thing that did it, apparently, was the selling of two-in-one Blu Ray and Playstation 3 players starting sometime in the middle of last year. As an ign.com story observed last April, “Sony is using the PlayStation 3 to act as something of a Trojan Horse to get players into people’s homes.”
“Spurred in part by the sale of 2 million PlayStation 3 consoles, Sony officials have claimed that, according to research data, cumulative sales of Blu-ray discs have surpassed those for HD-DVD for the first time,” according to a 2.6.07 posting on Gamasutra.com.
“According to Nielsen VideoScan, the consumer research firm for the VHS and DVD sell-through industry, in addition to an overall lead in sales to date, Blu-ray movies outsold those released for the HD-DVD format by more than a 2-to-1 margin during the first week of January. This equates to 47.14 HD DVD titles sold for every 100 Blu-ray titles.
“The report also found that Blu-ray titles outsold HD-DVD releases by nearly a 3-to-1 margin during January’s second week, with 38.36 HD-DVD titles sold for every 100 Blu-ray releases.
“Sony officials also revealed that, according to an online survey of approximately 100,000 current PlayStation 3 owners conducted by the company, 90 percent have watched a Blu-ray movie on their console.
“This high percentage is likely helped by the bundled Talladega Nights Blu-ray disc with the first 500,000 units of PlayStation 3. But even apart from that, 80 percent of those surveyed plan to purchase further Blu-ray movies, while 72 percent of respondents stated that they plan to rent a Blu-ray movie in the near future.”
Variety‘s Diane Garrett has answered a question I put forward on 2.17 about the prospects of a restored African Queen DVD. The answer is, don’t hold your breath. The video rights are now held by Paramount Home Video (Fox Home Video having allowed its license to lapse) and the film is “awaiting restoration” — i.e., no funding has been approved/finalized to pay for a restoration of this 1951 classic John Huston film — “and has no set release date” — i.e., no restoration in sight, no release plans.
Garrett also reveals that the Criterion Collection is “devoting exacting care to [releasing] Billy Wilder‘s Ace in the Hole — good news! (Keep in mind that a restored print of Ace in the Hole was shown at Manhattan’s Film Forum from 1.12.07 through 1.18.07.) Criterion president Peter Becker acknowledges that “it often takes years to prepare special editions,” and says “we realize we are, in effect, suppressing these films while we are waiting to give them special edition treatment,.”
Warner Home Video’s George Feltenstein also reveals that “only right now are we able to release The Magnificent Ambersons,” Orson Welles‘ studio-mangled 1942 classic, which “will come out on disc next year.” (Not a big deal in my book — the Holy Amberson’s Grail is to find the footage that RKO and editor Robert Wise chopped out and reconstruct Welles’ original cut.)
Richard Armstrong‘s “Sense of Cinema” appreciation of Ace in the Hole is worth reading. The last graph is especially interesting:
“While Ace in the Hole won an award at the Venice Film Festival, it flopped so badly at the American box office that a chastened Wilder went on to mainly adapt hit Broadway plays until 1960.” In other words, the reception to Ace in the Hole is the reason Wilder did director-for-hire movies like The Seven Year Itch, The Spirit of St. Louis, Love in the Afternoon and Witness for the Prosecution all through the mid to late ’50s.
“Most Americans either hated the film or stayed away,” Armstrong continues. “Reviewers savaged it in turn. In 1997, the film was remade as Mad City (Costa- Gavras). If the title Mad City carries a hint that this city is exceptional, it also reminds us that Ace in the Hole‘s title was changed to The Big Carnival, according to the industry convention that ‘Big’ suggested exceptionally immoral doings.
“Oddly, the studios are still dependent upon yet scared of an unpredictable crowd. And with good reason, perhaps. As Wilder once said, people are people, after all. Fifty years on, some still pause at highway pile-ups.”
I’m also thinking back to that great Kirk Douglas speech in Ace in the Hole in which he speaks of his love for the rich culture and character of New York City compared to the primeval benefits of living in a hick town with its access to nature’s splendor, and Douglas saying that “the four spindly trees outside of Rockefeller Center” are all the nature that he needs in that department.
A story about Groucho and Chico Marx, passed along by N.Y. Times columnist Dick Cavett and called “Luck in the Afternoon.” If I described it as “hilarious,” a certain percentage would go “not funny enough.” (By the way, the anecdote about meeting anti-Semitism with claims of half-Jewishness is funnier with that Barry Goldwater joke about asking an anti-Semitic golf course manager if he could play nine holes, etc.)
Update: CHUD correspondent Devin Faraci just pointed out that it’s a “Times Select” piece, so I’m going to risk the wrath of Times Online staffers by pasting it here:
February 15, 2007, 7:44 pm
Luck in the Afternoon
Groucho stories, even if you’ve heard them, are still good. Like the well-known story of his daughter and the restricted country club pool. Groucho: “But my daughter’s only half-Jewish. Can she go in up to her waist?”
I have a particular fondness for the one I’m about to tell you, partly because I got it directly from Groucho. I may have told it in the 1982 documentary, “The Marx Brothers in a Nutshell.”
The setting is vaudeville. The young Marx brothers had barely heard of movies and were rollicking around the country as big stage stars and enjoying the fruits of fame, one being its proven effectiveness as an aphrodisiac. “You know my brother’s name is often mispronounced,” Groucho would say. “My uncle [Al Shean] who named us all pronounced it Chicko because of my brother’s monumental success with `chicks.’ He was catnip to all women. And we were opposites in other ways, too.”
They were playing somewhere in Iowa. One night while they were removing their makeup, there was a knock at the dressing room door and a middle-aged Jewish couple came in. After effusive compliments on the boys’ act, the husband said, “We know you boys are Jewish, and we thought you might like to come to our house on Friday night for a traditional Jewish dinner.” The invitation was accepted.
On Wednesday, Groucho and Chico were out strolling, and Chico, with his genius for numbers (and lack of it for gambling), noticed a house address. He said, “Isn’t that the number of those nice people’s house?” It was, and it was the house. They decided to pay a call.
They rang the bell and an attractive girl appeared. As luck (or something) would have it, there were the couple’s two pretty daughters. The parents were out.
Groucho: “Thanks to Chico’s skills in this area, in two shakes of a lamb’s tail we were out of our clothes and in bed with the two daughters. Balancing Chico’s great luck in getting us there, his ill luck dealt the next card. The bedroom door opened and there were the parents.
“Chico was more accustomed to this sort of predicament than I was, so I followed his example — which was grabbing up our clothes and high-tailing it out the window. Fortunately, we were on the ground floor. In any case, the penultimate thing the parents saw were our two buck-naked rear ends disappearing over the window sill. The ultimate thing they saw was Chico’s head reappearing momentarily, saying, ‘I hope this doesn’t affect Friday night.'”
Guillermo Arriaga‘s The Night Buffalo, a novel about an intense love triangle, intense sex, betrayal, death, schizophre- nia and stabs at redemption, has been made into a sharply-honed drama with the same title — produced by Arriaga and directed by Jorge Hernandez Aldana.
Night Buffalo writer-producer Guillermo Arriaga at United Talent Agency headquarters — Thursday, 1.11.07, 4:20 pm
It’ll have its debut at the end of next week at the Sundance Film Festival. This, obviously, is mainly what this article is about — bringing attention to Arriaga’s film and (perhaps) helping him to land a U.S. distribution deal, as well as catching up with a guy I regard as a friend.
In Arriaga’s words, The Night Buffalo is the story “of a man named Manuel (Diego Luna) and a very good friend named Gregorio (Gabriel Gonzalez), who is schizophrenic, and about Gregorio’s great love for his girlfriend Tania (Liz Gallardo). Manuel and Tania are the people Gregorio trusts the most, but while he’s going in and out of the mental asylums, they begin having a relationship until they fall in love. Obviously the relationship between Gregorio and his girlfriend is broken and the friendship is broken.
“When these friends seem to reconcile, Gregorio kills himself, and he leaves Manuel a box with secret messages after being dead, with letters, photographs, tapes, and slowly Manuel begins to get into the spiral of madness that his friend has been living. So this is a story of madness, of love, of a sense of being lost, of guilt, and how in the end you have to realize and assume the consequences of your acts and the valued importance of love.”
Arriaga is best known as the guy who penned Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu‘s three films — Amores Perros, 21 Grams and Babel — as well as Tommy Lee Jones‘ The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada. Arriaga is also known for the big creative split that happened between himself and Gonzalez Innarritu sometime early last year (but not revealed until last May, during the Cannes Film Festival).
Just before I left I snapped this shot of Arriaga and Night Buffalo co-producer Jimena Rodriguez — Thursday, 1,11,07, 5:45 pm
I’ve been friendly with Arriaga since the time of 21 Grams (i.e., three years ago). We’ve been talking about sitting down and discussing The Night Buffalo for a long while now. We finally did this in a conference room at the United Talent Agency building yesterday afternoon. Here’s what resulted.
Our chat went on for the better part of an hour. It’s a bit quieter than the Sienna Miller conversation. I wasn’t in a journalistically pushy frame of mind. The gentle, soft-spoken Arriaga had that effect on me.
At the end of our chat I also met Night Buffalo co-producer Jimena Rodriguez, who will be with Arriaga in Park City along with the rest of the team.
Sundance honcho Geoffrey Gilmore says that “male culture, the fickleness of love, and desperate searching by lost souls are only some of the subjects this highly erotic, superbly photographed depiction of young lovers touches upon.
“As despicable as the behavior of this very dysfunctional community is, the need for love and absolution is relentless. As a treatise on the cognitive dissonance of romance, The Night Buffalo is pure and powerful storytelling. It may show us things that we don’t want to see, but it will eventually lead us to a fuller understanding of the mysterious power of love.”
The first Night Buffalo screening will be at 9 pm on Friday, 1.19.07, at Park City’s Egyptian theatre. Then comes a midnight screening on 1.20 at the Holiday Village followed by a 3:15 pm the next day (Sunday) at the same venue. The screening at the Tower theatre in Salt Lake City on Wednesday, 1.24, at 9 pm doesn’t count because nobody goes to Salt Lake City during Sundance and the festival is essentially over anyway by that day.
Late yesterday afternoon I dropped by the office of Picturehouse chief Bob Berney (on the fifth floor of a Fifth Avenue landmark building in the high 40s, just south of Saks) to talk about the exceptionally strong Pan’s Labyrinth numbers, and here’s what he had to say.
The Spanish-language dark-fantasy flick opened last Friday on 17 screens and had earned $779,427 as of yesterday, with a million-dollar tally expected by sometime today. The 8:20 pm show I went to last night was all but sold out — several Upper West Side fanboy types but also a lot of couples and a few single women.
Berney figures that at this stage Pan’s Labyrinth is mainly benefitting from the Guillermo del Toro fanboys (i.e., the guys who are loyal because of the Blade flick he directed and particularly Hellboy) plus the attraction spurred by the great reviews (Metacritic is calling it the best-reviewed film of the year), the Best Foreign Language Film awards from the critics and the expected Oscar nom(s).
Berney happened to be talking to del Toro when I entered his office; Bob handed me the cell phone and Guillermo and I spoke about maybe getting together some- time next week in Los Angeles, perhaps with producer-screenwriter Kit Carson making it a third.
Here (again) is the recording of our nine-minute chat — Berney’s and mine, I mean. About halfway through my phone rang loudly — I forgot to turn it off. Then Picturehouse exec vp marketing Marian Koltai-Levine came in to discuss some promotional fan-greeting activities she wants del Toro to try and get to sometime later this week or next.
Weinstein Co, publicist Liz Biber told me this morning that George Hickenlooper‘s Factory Girl(Weinstein Co., 12.29) will definitely screen “several” times this week for the benefit of New York and Los Angeles critics, as well as the Hollywood Foreign Press. (The National Board of Review saw it yesterday afternoon.) She said she’ll be contacting everyone on both coasts today and giving them screening dates and times between now and Saturday.
This despite the last-minute, down-to-the-wire additional shooting last month and the re-editing and re-mixing that Hickenlooper finished only yesterday morning (with more tweaks to come over the next week or two), and despite some critics (including a couple of influential ones from the LAFCA and NYFCC orgs, which will decide their annual awards this coming Sunday and Monday, respectively) complaining that the Weinstein Co. doesn’t have its act together and that showing a would-be contender this late in the game makes it difficult all around.
The odds that anyone will jump up and down about Factory Girl or even the performances are not high at this stage of the game — let’s face it. But you have to admire the spirit of HIckenlooper and the Weinstein Co. to somehow make it work despite the pressure and general insanity.
Biber wants it understood that there are still a few polishings and smoothing yet to be done on the version that will show this week. Those are curious terms when it comes to this film because Factory Girl has a deliberately raw, unpolished, Warhol-of- the-late-’60s visual scheme, which naturally synchs with the story and the era in which it happens.
Since running an early review last August, I’ve been waiting for the big end-of-the- year moment when it would finally start screening for the big-gun critics. Having pretty much done cartwheels over Sienna Miller ‘s performance as Edie Sedg- wick (and Guy Pearce‘s as Andy Warhol), I wanted to know if I’d be joined by several others or be all alone on an island.
I spoke to Us critic and NYFCC Thelma Adams this morning about this whole magillah, and she said that “several screenings at this stage of the game are not good enough for me right now.” But NYFCC members vote next Monday and the screenings start tomorrow, I countered — you have four or five days to see it. “This is very last minute,” Adams said. “I’m a mom, I have to commute into town…if they sent me a DVD I could maybe watch it.
“I’d like to see it, I’m curious to see it…but it’s the deluge factor right now. They’re screening Letters From Iwo Jima and The Good Shepherd this week, to name but two. This has been a good year and I could easily fill a top ten list right now, and you have so many Best Actress contenders already in place. .Sienna Miller doesn’t stand a chance unless she’s drop-dead brilliant. Bless their hearts” — she meant the Weinstein Co. — “but they’re pushing too much, too late. It almost seems to do a disservice to the film to put it out this way.”
The inability of guys in their 30s to grow up and live adult lives is far and away the most persistent GenX theme in movies today. David Munro‘s Full Grown Men, which played Friday night and Saturday afternoon at the AFI Film Festival, is another in this vein. A guy named Alby (Matt McGrath ) decides he can’t hack being a husband and a father and decides to hook up with his his best friend from childhood and a few others in the same boat, etc.
Sarah Rafferty, Francesca Faridany, Matt McGrath at the Full Grown Men after-party — Friday, 11.4.06, 12:15 am
I’ve never been much for extended adolesence, but I can say without qualification that I loved the Full Grown Men after-party that began late Friday night. Free drinks and food, good people to talk to. If you insist upon hearing an opinion of the film, consider the words of the great F.X. Feeney: “It’s a very funny, very tough-minded film about the need to grow up…as entertaining as the wine tour in Sideways and lyrical throughout, with a strong ‘sense of place’, particularly about the American dreamland that is Florida.”
I ran into McGrath early on and took his picture. He’s been making films since he was in his late teens — Ironweed, Bob Roberts, The Impostors, Boys Don’t Cry, The Broken Hearts Club, The Anniversary Party, The Notorious Bettie Page. His New York stage work has brought a lot of good attention also — Cabaret, Distant Fires (for which he won an LA Weekly Award) and Hedwig and the Angry Inch.
The latter performance inspired the New York Times wrote that Matt brought “a slow hand to his delivery with droll, molasses-paced double takes to match. And even more than [the role’s originator], he finds a startling individuality in the different voices within Hedwig.”
I don’t know what I’m doing or saying, but McGrath is a good actor with a likable personality. Not that we talked for very long. The highlight of the evening came when I ordered a skirt steak. I spoke mainly with the film’s publicist Mickey Cottrell; the dominant topic was his new Blackberry Pearl.
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More » - Delicious, Demonic Otto Gross
For me, A Dangerous Method (2011) is David Cronenberg‘s tastiest and wickedest film — intense, sexually upfront and occasionally arousing...
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