Adrienne Shelly‘s widow Andy Ostroy has told ABC’s Eyewitness News that “my wife…did not kill herself.” He said that “so much remains a mystery, like the money missing from her wallet and the uniden- tified shoe print in the bathtub.” He says these are highly suspicious circumstances and worth looking into before his wife’s death is ruled a suicide. On late Wednesday afternoon Ostroy “found his wife of five years face up on the bathroom floor of the apartment. Investigators say she had a bed sheet tied around her neck, the sheet was hanging from a shower rod.”
Who and what the hell is Ezekiel 22, and why are the principals of this Atlanta-based company allegedly paying $3.8 million for rights in all media to the story of three not-terribly-brilliant Mexican guys who drifted 5,000 miles across the Pacific, from San Blas to the Marshall Islands, and had to resort to “occasionally” drinking their own urine to stay alive?
Is this some kind of put-on? Has Yahoo Entertainment News been taken over by a team of Onion-styled satirists?
Late this afternoon a story was posted on Yahoo Entertainment News with a headline that read “Movie to make millionaires of lost Mexico fishermen.” The story begins, “Three Mexicans who spent nine months drifting across the Pacific Ocean in a flimsy fishing boat eating raw fish and sea birds are to be paid at least $3.8 million to turn their story into a movie.
“The three — all fishermen who said they were too poor to afford a better boat or modern fishing tackle — have signed a contract to sell their story to an Atlanta- based company [which] negotiated 8-year exclusive rights to market the story to film companies, book publishers and merchandisers, said government official Silverio Aspericueta, adding that the final payment could be even higher. He said the company’s name was Ezekiel 22.”
A company calling itself Ezekiel 22 — a chapter in the Old Testament that has to do with the sins of old Jerusalem — seems to indicate an interest in business ventures with a certain historical-religious slant. Do the principals of Ezekiel 22, if there is such a company, see three guys surviving a long trip across the Pacific as some kind of Biblical tale about God’s benevolence, like God letting Jonah live by having the “big fish” spit him up?
Wikipedia says that the book of Ezekiel contains three distinct sections — judgment on Israel, prophecies against various neighboring nations, and prophecies delivered after the destruction of Jerusalem by Nebuchadnezzar II. Bible Gateway, a relligious right website, offers the entirety of Ezekiel 22 and at the beginning of the chapter are the words “Jerusalem’s Sins.”
Leaving aside the anti-Israel/Christian-right angle, why would any company prom- ise to pay $3.8 million to three intellectually-challenged Mexican guys for the rights to their story? They could have bought them for a less than that, surely. And who wants to see a movie about Mexican guys who were too dumb to hoist a sail or bring oars on a seafaring journey, and watch them eating fish and seagulls and drinking their own piss?
This is one of the weirdest news stories I’ve ever read.
And by the way, if you want to read some really hot-sounding descriptons of wild sexual abandon by pair of sluts, read Ezekiel 23, which is called “Two Adulterous Sisters.” Some of the language is so graphic and steamy it reads like something out of a 1975 issue of the National Lampoon.
Consider this passage: “Yet she became more and more promiscuous as she recalled the days of her youth, when she was a prostitute in Egypt. There she lusted after her lovers, whose genitals were like those of donkeys and whose emission was like that of horses. So you longed for the lewdness of your youth, when in Egypt your bosom was caressed and your young breasts fondled.”
Just a couple of guys sitting in a restaurant, talking it out. It’s not just the acting in this scene (and the fact that the actors are so legendary-iconic), but the writing. The dialogue is straight, clean…entirely about fundamentals.
It wasn’t quite the same during a sit-down with the creator of this scene, Michael Mann, a couple of weeks ago at his office in West Los Angeles. The idea was to talk about the new Taschen book about Mann and his career — a luscious visual smorgasbord (the photos are choice in a very special off-center way) coupled with insightful, exceptionally well-sculpted analysis by F.X. Feeney . It turned out to be more of a casual chit-chat, although a fascinating one. 40, 45 minutes…the minutes just flew.
Mann just wanted to relax and talk, which meant no recording or taking pictures …cool. I didn’t take many notes as we went along; I asked about everything; there was no vein to it.
So to get myself rolling on a piece, I wrote Feeney and suggested we do an online q & a like we did before about his Roman Polanski book. So I wrote some ques- tions and he sent back the answers last night. But before I run it, consider this graph from Feeney’s first chapter:
“Over the course of the eight feature films he has directed since 1971, Michael Mann has shown himself, time and again, to be a rigorous, honest dramatist, a maker of solid worlds. So much so that in America, at least, he tends to be underrated. The most respectful of his critics define him (a bit too simply) as a realist. Certainly, Mann seeks authenticity above all…but perhaps the most accurate word for him is ‘ synthesist ‘…[an artist who] immerses himself thor- oughly, breaking the truth of a given topic down to its working parts, throwing away whatever rings false.”
I don’t just love Michael Mann’s films — I want to live in them. I want the clarity, the decisiveness, the certainty, the edge, the coolness…all of that stuff. A lot of people feel this way. Guys, mostly, but whatever. Here’s the back-and-forth…
JW: I notice Mann is actually listed as a co-author on the Taschen website.
FXF: That’s true, and fair to say. The book has three authors: I wrote the text; Paul Duncan (who also edits the entire filmmaker series for Taschen) chose the photos and directed the layouts; and Michael Mann was not only the book’s subject, he took an extremely active role in its production — providing Paul in-depth access to his archives, inviting me to witness him at work, indeed making time to sit with me for hours of in-depth interviews.
JW: How did you get that kind of cooperation from Mann? I remember you mentioning when we spoke at CineVegas that there had been a previous attempt at a Mann/Taschen book, which you were not part of.
FXF: I even mention it in the first chapter of the book, by way of dramatizing the high-pressure challenges in store for any critic who takes on a creative individual as exacting and enigmatic as Michael Mann. Beyond that, it’s not worth mentioning: Read the book! I have a strong take on Mann, which Taschen was willing to support. I had just completed the Polanski book in April 2004 when the Mann assignment came back into the open. Paul Duncan and I enjoy a good working relationship; I dove in. We were realistic and flexible. We figured that if my essay got rejected by Mann, then to hell with it…so much for a Taschen-Mann book.
But as it turned out, Mann was engaged by what I wrote. “Engaged” as opposed to flattered — near as I can tell, he’s immune to flattery; what he seems to crave instead is experience and information — and once engaged, he opened his doors to me. I spent much of the summer of Collateral (2004) in intensive conversation with him. My essay posed explicit and implicit questions he would either knock down or answer. As I hope is plain in the finished book, if there was a disagreement, we each stood our respective grounds — Michael getting the last word in most cases. I was more interested in what he had to say.
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JW: What were the so called “high pressure challenges for any critic” who takes on Mann?
FXF: Only one — but an important one. Too many well-meaning critics and fans describe Mann as “a subverter of genres,” as a kind of movie buff hell-bent on reinvigorating the crime film. In his own view, he is anything but. “Genre” is a word for which he has no personal use.
JW: If Mann doesn’t “subvert genres,” then why are Thief, Heat, Collateral and Miami Vice all superior examples of “the crime movie”?
FXF: Because Mann sees them as pictures drawn from life. As I say, he’s interested in first-hand experience. He comes out of a tough neighborhood in Chicago, has gotten to know cops and criminals, and is himself by nature what I call “a stealth non-conformist.” By that I mean, Mann has a very self-directed, fundamentally rebellious nature, yet paradoxically he is skilled at blending in. Small wonder his heroes and villains alike so often live under-cover; Mann respects that what is least dispensible about a person’s character is that which thrives in private — in secret, even.
When other directors of his generation (Francis Coppola, Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, George Lucas) were establishing their flamboyant personal styles and vivid reputations through their great films of the 1970s, Mann was playing it close to the vest, working in television, a place few self-respecting auteurs would deign to spend time in those wasteland days, developing his craft as a writer-director, above all mastering the business as a producer.
By the time he made his debut feature Thief (1981), he was already full grown as an artist — and Thief is one deeply realized work, down to its tiniest fibers. Somebody once asked Mann how he exerted such control over a film’s final cut so early in his career, and he replied: “Because I cut the checks.” Amen. Or, as Crockett marvels of an adversary, early in the new Miami Vice film: “Those are skill sets.”
JW: What would you say is the personal trait that stands out above all others with Mann?
FXF: His mantra is “get it right.” By that he means, get your facts right, insure that your aesthetic decisions in making a movie follow what is actual and logical in the world at large. Mann has a strong sensual streak — music is clearly a deep (if not his deepest) source of inspiration — and a high susceptibility to visual beauty, yet he never lets his appetites for these get the upper hand. Everything in his work is subordinated to concrete use, either in terms of what interests the characters, or those dynamics which reveal the deeper character of the world to the onlooker.
Here’s one vivid example from my encounters with him. He was leafing through my Polanski book — attentive, silent, un-judging — but when he closed it, asked me one question: “What did Polanski’s father do for a living?” Damn. I had to admit, I didn’t know — Mann had stumped the band on his first try. Yet this is such a simple question, and an important one, if you think about it — “how the world works” is best revealed by the specific work people do — and I had forgotten to ask it.
JW: What did Polanski’s father do for a living?
FXF: Polanski’s father was an artist in Paris, and when he returned to Krakow in the late 1930s, it was to take an office job at a factory owned by relatives. (Thanks for asking, Michael!)
JW: Like all big-name directors, Mann has a coterie of journalist and film-critic loyalists who think he’s one of the greatest and stand up for him time and again. I am one of these, frankly. I’ve sensed for a long time now — unquestionably since Heat — a profound respect for the guy, and a kind of corresponding allegiance.
FXF: My sense is that Mann characteristically makes movies that are critic-proof — he thinks and works everything through to such a degree that few can ever seriously quarrel with his intentions or his technique. Back in the 1980s a few reviewers tried to wisecrack him into a corner over the success of Miami Vice on TV, belittling him “a glossy stylist,” and so on. I was guilty of this myself, if memory serves — but over time, the films have held up so solidly to repeated viewing that we cutups in the peanut gallery have been obliged to acknowledge, at last and belatedly, that yes, here is a giant, ingenious body of work in progress.
JW: What was the turning point for you?
FXF: The Insider (1999). Of course, I’d admired Manhunter, Last of the Mohicans and Heat as individual films — but it was watching Mann penetrate the contemporary world of corporate authority, in which matters of life and death are decided over desks and behind closed doors, that the living totality and cumulative value of his filmography became unmistakable, and a source of abiding amazement. Others felt the same way, I know.
Since that time, Mann’s only difficulties with critics have arisen out of certain specific expectations that sometimes get raised, extraneous to the intrinsic quality of the films themselves.
For example, Ali (2001) — if you grew up feeling emotionally involved with the real Muhammed Ali, or were enchanted as most critics were by the late `90s documentary about him called When We Were Kings, then accepting Will Smith in the role, or revisiting scenes from the life of Malcolm X so vividly covered in Spike Lee’s Malcolm X, became a bit of a stumbling block — at least on a first viewing. (Also, the film opened two months after 9/11, when both the viewing public and the very practice of moviegoing were heavily depressed.) See Ali now on DVD, and its overriding virtues quietly but forcefully assert themselves — Will Smith’s performance being one of them; I think it’s the best thing he has ever done.
What’s more, you have a portrait of America in the 1960s and `70s that for my money is unsurpassed in terms of its authentic detail and atmosphere. Mann intelligently, skillfully reveals Ali as a leader on a par with Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, and Patrice Lamumba — a lesser filmmaker would have been content to celebrate his greatness as a boxer.
JW: How did Mann’s manner with you evolve as you got to know him?
FXF: No change. Steady, steady, steady. He knows who he is. Over time, anyone who works with him is privileged to glimpse a person of deep emotional sensitivity and compassionate awareness within the tough-guy fortress-of-solitude that is his workaday persona — he would not be able to create characters so deeply if this quality were not there — but at the same time, he is completely unsentimental. When he expresses a feeling, you trust it, even if it stings. There’s nothing willed or manipulative — no bullshit — about what he’s telling you.
JW: What do you think of The Keep…honestly? That film, to me, is the runt of the litter…almost the bizarre aberration that doesn’t belong in the family.
FXF: You ought to see it again, Jeff — as with all of Mann, it only gets better. Yet of all his films, The Keep is the only one where you sense Mann himself was unresolved about how to dramatize certain things. As I say in the book, he hadn’t yet found a way to use the audience’s imagination as an ally when dealing with monstrous evil — ergo, he shows “the monster.”
It’s interesting that one film later, in Manhunter, he successfully trusts that the Unseen is even more terrifying than what we do see. Hence, Mann removed the dragon tattoo that he originally intended to be an outward expression of torment on the skin of the serial killer, Francis Dollarhyde. “It would trivialize his struggle,” he told actor Tom Noonan. So we are forced to imagine the monstrosity inside Dollarhyde, and there it is. But The Keep is an honorable effort to achieve the same illumination.
JW: Is Mann his own singular invention, or does he stem from a tradition of distinctive realist directors?
FXF: He loves all the hardworking explorers — Kubrick, Pabst, George Stevens — but he is his own man, as an artist. Life influences him far more than other artists.
JW: The film that turned Mann on the most when he was young — the one that made him decide to be a filmmaker, was G.W. Pabst‘s Joyless Street. Which I’ve never seen. Have you?
FXF: No. And I guess this is like not knowing what Roman Polanski’s father did for a living. You’ve stumped the band, Jeff! But I’ve seen enough of Pabst’s other work (Pandora’s Box; Diary of a Lost Giorl; Threepenny Opera) to feel a lucid sense of what so excited Mann about Joyless Street at age 21 that he decided on the spot to become a filmmaker — Pabst is one who never imposes himself visibly on the story he is telling. He instead yields great power out of the characters, and his own observation of life.
JW: When Pacino asks DeNiro in Heat if he ever wanted “a regular-type life,” De Niro doesn’t say (as you relate in the book), “What is that, barbecues?” He says, “The fuck is that… barbecues and ball games?” And Pacino, almost smiling, waits a beat and a half and goes, “Yeah.”
FXF: I wasn’t quoting the line in its entirety; I was synopsizing, touching on specifics to make a larger point — and I only had 25,000 words. There are never enough!
JW: What film do you consider to be his best, and why? If you can’t name just one, try to at least give me a tie between two films.
FXF: My favorite is Last of the Mohicans — a stunning evocation of early America. Everything that is greatest about Mann — his sense of history, his love of women, his sensitivity to the intricacies of motive (even Magua the terrifying renegade has reasons for being so brutal; white men killed his wife and children); Mann’s total commitment to getting everything right, down to the least corset and chord of music. And then — selfishly — I love that period of American history. There simply haven’t been enough films about it.
Happiness and lethargy are merely flip sides of the same coin. People who go “whoopee” when things are going well and “woe is me” when things are going badly are slaves in a jungle of illusion. There is only the cosmic hum and continuity of it all.
That is why people who spray champagne on their friends and scream “we’re number one!” when their football or soccer or baseball or basketball teams wins are cosmic midgets. And why this front-page story that appeared in the Times this afternoon will only excite or encourage children.
It reads, “After days of flirting with its all-time peak, the Dow Jones industrial average finally set a new record this afternoon. The Dow gained 56.99 points, or 0.5 percent, to close at 11,727.34. The index√ɬ¢√¢‚Äö¬¨√¢‚Äû¬¢s previous closing high of 11,722.98 was set on Jan. 14, 2000.
“The latest record came as oil prices fell about 3 percent and dropped below $60 a barrel for the first time since March. Energy prices have been falling in the last month because fears of hurricanes, troubles in the Middle East and tight supplies have eased markedly since the end of summer.
“Earlier today, the Dow topped another record reached on Jan. 14, 2000, as it traded at an all-time intraday high of 11,758.87. The stock market rally that led to the 2000 peak had been fueled by growth in technology and a belief that the internet would transform businesses. The rally over the last few months, however, has had more modest roots: signs that the economy is moderating and inflation is tame.”
That story about Brad Pitt supposed being “lined up” to replace Tom Cruise in the next Mission: Impossible film is “ totally untrue” and “utter fiction,” a senior Paramount Pictures spokesperson said early this afternoon.
Okay…the Pitt deal is a pipe dream. Does this mean Paramount intends to make M:I:4 (assuming they want to produce it) with Cruise, despite Viacom chief Sumner Redstone having recently booted him off the Paramount lot? The Mission: Impossible franchise “has been an extremely successful one for this studio, ” the spokesperson replied, “but whatever moves we make regarding the future makeup of these films is undetermined at this time.”
The story was linked and/or posted on Hollywood Wiretap, Jo Blo and Cinematical this morning, but the origin was an Evening Standard site called www.this islondon.co.uk, or “London Lite.”
The questionable “London Lite” story said that Pitt starring in the franchise would make him “the highest-paid actor in Hollywood history”, with “sources” saying that Paramount is “willing” to offer a salary topping 21 million pounds, or something approaching the vicinity of $40 million U.S. dollars.
“An insider told London Lite that ‘MI:IV will not include Cruise’s character, agent Ethan Hunt’ and that Paramount-based producers “are set on Brad taking over as a gutsy new head operative who puts together his own unique team of specialists.” The story said that “they’re considering a brief mention, saying Hunt retired to live a safe life with his new wife”, blah, blah.
The first words that came out my mouth this afternoon as I watched the closing credits of Todd Field‘s Little Children were “very interesting.” It’s a wee bit cold and a little bit strange, but it’s also a very poised (i.e., stylized but not overly so), carefully composed art film — and as such it has my complete respect.
That sounds like I’m holding back, doesn’t it? I’m not trying to. I just don’t know how else to put it.
It’s less naturalistically moving than Fields’ In The Bedroom, but then it’s a step up from that film — Fields isn’t trying for similar moods and tones. It’s certainly one of the most impressive suburban malaise films I’ve ever seen, in part because the feelings of dread are constant and unnerving. Every step of the way you’re thinking, “Something really bad might happen here.”
This is not a film looking to warm anyone’s heart — that’s for sure. And yet it brings compassion and insight and exquisite humor to its story, which is based on a novel by Tom Perrotta (who also wrote Election), who co-scripted with Fields. It’s a story about characters and situations that I partly recognize and certainly believe in, with almost every one seriously handicapped in one way or another.
Little Children may be better than I’m able to give it credit for right now, three hours after seeing it at the Varsity. I know I haven’t seen anything like it in a long, long while. It’s immensely satisfying and pleasurable to watch a film as ambitious and precise and high-strung as this, and yet it’s not a soother. This said, I’m not sure if it’s an Oscar derby movie or not. I can see how some might find it too queer for their tastes, and I can see some being excited — turned on — by its apart-ness.
This is a film about emotionally arrested adults — 30- and 40-somethings who desperately need to live in their own private dreamspaces, and hang the consequences.
I really loved the perfectly phrased narration (read by Will Lyman), which reminds me somewhat of the dry, sardonic narration in Stanley Kubrick‘s Barry Lyndon. The turn-off element, I suspect, will be the sex-offender character (played by Jackie Earle Haley). He’s a sad, self-torturing, pathetic, very real person — a character I’m not likely to forget. Kudos to Earle for bringing something (don’t know what exactly) really fascinating to it.
Kate Winslet‘s performance, it seems to me, is a near-lock for a Best Actress nom, and I was totally knocked out by how good Patrick Wilson is — it’s the best thing he’s ever done so far, and I’m including his superb acting in in Mike Nichols‘ Angels Over America. Jennifer Connelly also, I feel, outdoes herself here.
If nothing else, this is a fascinating things-are-fucked-up-in-surburbia movie. Everyone needs to see it and chew it over. I plan on seeing it at least another couple of times.
Triumph of Others
That Telluride Film Festival hype about Florian Henckel- Donnersmarck‘s The Lives of Others (Sony Classics, 2.07) was based on serious substance. This is one of the most penetrating German-made “heart” films I’ve ever seen — the love story at the center of it is tender and impassioned and ripely erotic — and yet it’s also a very chilling and gripping drama about political terror.
Martina Gedek, Sebastian Koch in The Lives of Others
And yet it’s very much of an interior thing — emotional at every turn and at times quite sad. Gray and dispiriting at other times, but with a touching “up” element at the end.
The Lives of Others is a political thriller with compassion — a movie about spying and paranoia and the worst aspects of Socialist bloc rigidity and bureacratic thug- gery, and yet one that delivers a metaphor that says even the worst of us can move towards openness and a lessening of hate and suspicion. Ugliness need not rule.
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It’s about the turning of a bad guy — a Stasi secret policeman (Ulrich Muhe) who is first seen as a bloodless and fiendish bureaucrat, but whose determination to spy upon and mangle the lives of a playwright (Sebastian Koch) and his actress wife (Martina Gedek) for the sake of career advancement gradually weakens and erodes, and then flips over into something else entirely.
Call it a fable or (if you’re German) unrealistic in an historical political sense, but I bought it and so did everyone else at last night’s packed screening at the Elgin. The crowd stood up at the end of the 9 pm show — clapping, cheering, woo-wooing. Muhe and Henckel-Donnersmarck, the 33 year-old director-writer, left their seats and went up on stage and took bows — several bows. They waved and smiled as the cheers kept coming, and then they turned to each other and hugged. Quite a moment.
Ulrich Muhe and Floridan Henckel-Donnersmarck taking bows on the stage of Toronto’s Elgin theatre last night around 11:15 pm.
The Lives of Others a one-week qualifying run in New York and Los Angeles, and then open it in February to coincide with the Oscar nominations. It’s all but guaranteed to be nominated as one of the five Best Foreign Films. It won 7 Lola Awards (Germany’s equivalent of the Oscar) — for Best Film, Best Director, Best Screenplay, Best Actor (Muhe), Best Supporting Actor (Ulrich Tukur) and Best Production Design.
Set in Berlin, the story mostly takes place in 1984 and ’85, although it jumps to ’89 (the year the Berlin Wall came down) and then to ’91 and ’93. During the 50-year history of the German Democratic Republic (’49 to ’89), the thugs who held the reins of power kept the citizenry in line through a network of secret police called the “Stasi”, an army of 200,000 bureaucrats and informers whose goal was “to know everything.”
Captain Gerd Wiesler (Muhe) is a highly placed Stasi officer who is prodded by a superior, Lieutenant Colonel Anton Grubitz (Tukur), to dig up anything negative he can on a famous playwright named Georg Dreyman (och) and his actress wife Christa-Maria Sieland (Gedeck, best known for her starring role in Mostly Martha).
Ulrich Muhe in The Lives of Others
At first the suspicions are baseless — Freyman is a dedicated socialist who believes in the GDR. But his loyalties evolve when he discovers that his wife has been pressured into a sexual relationship with a government bigwig, and especially after a theatrical director pal commits suicide due to despondency over his being blacklisted and prevented from working. Eventually Wiesler, who has had their apartment thoroughly bugged, has evidence that Wiesler is working to undermine the state.
And yet his immersion in the lives of this playwright and his actress wife leads, ironically, to a gradual bonding process — a feeling of identification and sympathy for the couple as human beings, artists…people he’d like to know and perhaps share passions with, despite his constricted personality and shadowy Stasi ways. He knows he’s not in their league and probably not worthy of their friendship, but he feels what he feels regardless.
I have to get downtown and hit the Varsity plex, but I’ll be speaking with Muhe and Henckel-Donnersmarck at their hotel tomorrow afternoon. Not counting Pedro Almodovar’s ,em>Volver< .em>, which I saw yeserday for the second time yesterday for reasons of pure pleasure, this is the first super-fine film I’ve seen at the Toronto Film Festival so far.
Later today is Venus and then Candy and then a Michael Moore thing at the Elgin, and finally a Volver party starting around 10:30 or 11 pm.
Triumph of Others
That Telluride Film Festival hype about Florian Henckel-Donnersmarck‘s The Lives of Others (Sony Classics, 2.07) was based on serious substance. This is one of the most penetrating “heart” German films I’ve ever seen — the love story that beats at the center of it is tender and impassioned and ripely erotic — and yet this is also a very chilling and gripping film about political terror.
And yet it’s very much of an interior thing — quite emotional, and at times quite sad. But with a deeply touching “up” element at the finale.
The Lives of Others is a political thriller with compassion — a movie about spying and paranoia and the worst aspects of Socialist bloc rigidity and bureacratic thuggery, and yet one that delivers a metaphor that says even the worst of us can move towards openness and a lessening of hate. Ugliness needn’t rule.
It’s about the turning of a bad guy — a Stasi secret policeman (Ulrich Muhe) who is first seen as a bloodless and fiendish bureaucrat, but whose determination to spy upon and mangle the lives of a playwright (Sebastian Koch) and his actress wife (Martina Gedek) for the sake of career advancement gradually weakens and erodes, and then flips over into something else entirely.
Call it a fable or unrealistic in an East German political sense, but I bought it and so did everyone else at last night’s screening at the Elgin. The crowd stood up at the end of the 9 pm show — clapping, cheering, woo-wooing. Muhe and Henckel-Donnersmarck, the 33 year-old director-writer, left their seats and went up on stage and took bows — several bows. They waved and smiled as the cheers kept coming, and then they turned to each other and hugged. Quite a moment.
Sony Classics is going to open Others in February to coincide with the Oscar nominations. It’s guaranteed to be nominated as one of the five Best Foreign Films. It won 7 Lola Awards (Germany’s equivalent of the Oscar) — for Best Film, Best Director, Best Screenplay, Best Actor (Muhe), Best Supporting Actor (Ulrich Tukur) and Best Production Design.
Set in Berlin, the story mostly takes place in 1984 and ’85, although it jumps to ’89 (the year the Berlin Wall came down) and then to ’91 and ’93. During the 50-year history of the German Democratic Republic (’49 to ’89), the thugs who held the reins of power kept the citizenry in line through a network of secret police called the “Stasi”, an army of 200,000 bureaucrats and informers whose goal was “to know everything.”
Captain Gerd Wiesler (Muhe) is a highly placed Stasi officer who is prodded by a superior, Lieutenant Colonel Anton Grubitz (Tukur), to dig up anything negative he can on a famous playwright named Georg Dreyman (Koch) and his actress wife Christa-Maria Sieland (Gedeck, best known for her starring role in Mostly Martha).
At first the suspicions are baseless — Freyman is a dedicated socialist who believes in the GDR. But his loyalties evolve when he discovers that his wife has been pressured into a sexual relationship with a government bigwig, and especially after a theatrical director pal commits suicide due to despondency over his being blacklisted and prevented from working. Eventually Wiesler, who has had their apartment thoroughly bugged, has evidence that Wiesler is working to undermine the state.
And yet his immersion in the lives of this playwright and his actress wife leads, ironically, to a gradual bonding process — a feeling of identification and sympathy for the couple as human beings, artists…people he’d like to know and share passions with, despite his constricted personality and shadowy ways.
I have to get downtown and hit the Varsity plex, but I’ll be speaking with Muhe and Henckel-Donnersmarck at their hotel tomorrow afternoon, but this is the first absolutely top-drawer film I’ve seen at the Toronto Film Festival so far.
Later today is Venus and then Candy, and then a Michael Moore thing at the Elgin, and then a Volver party starting around 10:30 or 11 pm.
Three or four hours after being released from Century City Doctors Hospital early Saturday afternoon, the swollen bear-claw hand and the red interstate highway streaks on my left arm had returned. My resources drained by my 16 hours at CCDC, I had no choice but to check into the UCLA Olive View County hospital in Sylmar. I stayed there Saturday night and all-day Sunday and am leaving today. And I think things really are cured now. My hand was actually operated on yesterday and the infection has been removed and I’ve been told I’m over the hump.
Intravenous antibiotics administered for 16 hours at CCDH on Friday and Saturday morning had merely suppressed the infection for appearance’s sake. The chumps at CCDH didn’t want to actually attend to the swollen, senstive-to-touch, pus-filled wound on my left palm (they were afraid of something going badly — private medicine procedure today is all about fear of possible malpractice lawsuits ), and by 5 pm Saturday I realized I had to go back into another hospital for Round 2.
I’d been told by a doctor at a Beverly Hills walk-in clinic a couple of days earlier that Olive View was “nicer than USC County”, so I drove up the 405 and onto 5 and into Sylmar — right up against the mountains in the northernmost area of the San Fernando Valley. I eventually found the hospital and was admitted to the Olive View emergency room by 8:30 pm.
Right away I knew I was dealing with very smart, ultra-focused doctors and nurses — professionals of a much higher order than the ones I encountered at CCDH. The Olive View doctors and nurses are straight off ER and St. Elsewhere and other TV shows of that type, by which I mean they seemed to say and do the right professional thing at all times.
A friendly, youngish, no-b.s. ER doctor named Bloomfield anesthetized, lanced and excavated the wound, and I was given more doses fo antibiotics Saturday night and all day Sunday. Another doctor and a small team performed a 15-minute operation late Saturday afternoon (I was put to sleep with a general anesthetic), and staffers gave me all kinds of pain medication and more antibiotic drips after I got out.
So I’m out of here this morning, and thank goodness for the stirring George Clooney goodness of the doctors at Olive View. Bloomfield is going to be featured on an upcoming epsode of some Discovery channel show about unusual medical experiences, or something like that. (I’ll pass along the details later.)
Do not ever go to Century City Doctors Hospital for anything, including directions. All they do is sedate and placate and get as much money as they can from you. I wouldn’t exactly call them a disgrace to their profession, but they’re contenders for that distinction. What they did for me on Friday was equivalent to a guy going to a hospital with a broken leg and the doctors saying, “Well, we’re not too sure we want to get into the leg part, but here’s some pain medication and we’ll send a therapist to your room so you can discuss your feelings.”
I’m typing this from the Olive View hospital library. The only thing good about CCDC is that they have broadband computer hookups in each private room. But that aside, forget it. They even refused to give me a copy of my medical chart so I could give it to the Olive View people. Or rather, they said I could have a copy but I’d have to come back to the hospital and fill out a form and give them $23 dollars, and then they’d fax it to me within 2 to 10 business days. I was told this by a bitchy senior nurse named Linda, who works on the 4th floor.
I’ve been writing this morning’s stuff from a hospital room. I had hoped that the minor infection from a dirty exacto-knife stabbing in my left palm (I mentioned this a couple of days ago, although the item seems to have strangely disappeared) would be suppressed by oral antibiotic medication. But it morphed into a systemic poisoning situation sometime on Thursday.
Dreary, mildly depressing hospital room — Saturday, 8.19, 9:45 am; far worse than a coach-level breakfast you might be served, say, on a New York to-London red-eye, and no warmer than room temperature.
It had turned my hand into a puffy bear claw by the time Thursday’s Snakes on a Plane screening was letting out. By yesterday afternoon (i.e., Friday) the infection had spread into my forearm — red streaks appeared like interstate highways on a road map — and all the way up to my left shoulder by dinner hour.
So I checked into a hospital and they hooked me up to regular (every five or six hours) antibiotic intravenous drips. The worst of it had passed by this morning, thank fortune, but if I’d been stuck out in the desert somewhere and beyond of the reach of good medicine…
The Fun’s Over
[Before reading this article, click on this mp3 file — the song you’ll hear fits the mood of what’s being said.]
For yours truly, the helium began to leak out of the Snakes on a Plane balloon when it was announced last Tuesday that New Line had decided not to advance- screen it for critics. That was a big uh-oh for those who knew the code. Then came last Friday afternoon’s Snakes presentation at Comic-Con, and that was it. End of story, case closed, unplug the phones.
Dumb animatronic snake drawing response from actress hired to play terrified passenger in New Line’s Snakes on a Plane (8.18)
Judging by the eight or nine-minute reel I saw in Hall H, Snakes on a Plane is going to be a wackazoid cheeseball thriller for the pseudo-hippers. But not that much fun for people like me.
The reel seemed to promise a film that will be energetic and kick-assy and will almost certainly do the old New Line exploitation bootie-shake from start to finish. But it also had some fake-snake CG that seemed to be generated by FX software created in 1997. And of course the snakes are lethal killing machines that actually go “hssss!” like a pissed-off audience sitting in a movie theatre. And some of the big snakes, like Spielberg’s Jaws shark, rumble and growl like lions on the plains of Kenya. And some of the animatronic snake models don’t look right.
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The reel promised a lot of screaming and sweating and some great snake-kill moments, but the cutting didn’t seem all that great. (It seemed to me that a bit with Samuel L. Jackson slipping into the pilot’s seat and trying to bring the plane out of a steep dive — a standard plane-thriller gambit — was handled pretty sloppily.)
And it had at least one instance of shamelessly bad dialogue when Jackson says to a senior stewardess when things get rough, “I need you to be strong for me.” A guy I talked to later on tried to dismiss this as part of the joke that I’m incapable of getting because of my own problems, not the movie’s. If I had a sense of humor I would relish the fact that Snakes on a Plane is a genre parody, he meant. So SoP is Airplane now? I think not. Some dialogue isn’t awful enough to be funny — it just goes thud.
The great Samuel L. Jackson (r.) at FBI agent Neville Flynn.
But the hoo-hah demeanor projected by Snakes director David R. Ellis is what really did it. 45 seconds after he walked out on-stage and started talking about the film, alarm bells were racketing in my head. A former stunt man, actor and 2nd A.D., Ellis reminds me of a hundred below-the-line guys I’ve met in this town over the last 20-odd years…an amiable go-alonger with a good sense of humor and a lot of friends….a guy who walks around in shorts and sandals and who likes to chill in the backyard on weekends with burgers on the barbie and a can of beer in his hand.
Don’t get me wrong. Snakes will be “fun” if you go with the right downmarket attitude. It’s a safe bet it’ll clean up when it opens on 8.18 (the guessers are talking a first-weekend tally in the mid to high 20s), and I’ve been told it has at least three or four “nooo!” scenes that fans are going to howl at as they text-message their friends and spread the word. If this happens it’ll probably translate into decent repeat business.
But the X-factor, smart-guy audience that had been primed and ready to enjoy this comic horror-thriller since the Snakes internet movement began last March has been jettisoned. Jettisoned back when the film was made, I mean. The hepcats loved the title and had fun with it, but they never realized (or wanted to realize) what kind of film Snakes on a Plane actually was all along. And I include myself in that equation.
The impression I got from the short reel on Friday is that Snakes on a Plane is maybe one-tenth as hip as the Snakes riffs we’ve all enjoyed the last three or four months on www.snakesonablog.com….if that.
Snakes on a Plane director David R. Ellis
I said it a long time ago, but the best part of Snakes on a Plane happened online in March and April. The movie couldn’t possibly live up to all the hype, and now we’re all starting to get the idea that it indeed hasn’t. Reality has set in, o my brothers. Welcome to the world of 116 No. Robertson Blvd.
Jackson,who was fantastic last Friday on the Hall H stage, said at one point that he loved what had happened with the internet Snakes frenzy, and that he’s looking forward to a day when interactive fans will create plot points for a new film — that the fans will one day become the new auteurs. In fact the fans were the auteurs with the Snakes on a Plane phenomenon. They ran the show. The Snakes team and the New Line “creatives” have been playing catch-up and “hey, can we get in on this thing?” all along.
Who knows what the three Snakes screenwriters — John Heffernan, Sebastian Gutierrez, David Dalessandro — had in mind in the early stages, but I know the Snakes footage I saw on Friday and the what-the-hell, pocket-the-paycheck attitude I picked up from David R. Ellis are one and the same.
The New Line powers-that-be have basically said, retroactively, “Uhh, thanks for the internet word-of-mouth guys. We all had some fun with those clever videos and songs and posters you came up with…really loved it. But that was you, not us. Thanks for thinking it might be and for helping us make millions, and…well, try not to blame us for not being on your wavelength.”
I guess I basically drove all the way down to San Diego last Thursday to have my concerns about Snakes on a Plane confirmed, and now they have been.
I’m sure New Line publicity would like me to be strong for them. Do the dance, hold the line and wait until the movie opens on Friday, 8.18. But they showed the footage at Comic-Con and brought Ellis up on the stage, and I think it’s fair to air my impressions of that.
It just hit me I may be helping the cause with this piece. Critics and media people who haven’t thought much about SoP may read it and go “stupid piece of shit” and write it off, and then they’ll pay to see it in theatres at those 10 pm shows on Thursday , 8.17 and — who knows? — maybe it’ll be a lot more entertaining than what the Comic-Con footage reel indicated and they’ll write good reviews and spread the word.
It’s always better to see a film with low expectations (or no expectations) than high ones. Any distribution exec will tell you this, including the ones at New Line.
Michael Mann‘s movies are so good and so Rolls Royce that when a new one comes up 8, it’s an easy 9.5 or 10 by everyone else’s standards. If you know his stuff, you know what I’m saying is true. I’m not using the Rolls Royce analogy casually. The elation I felt yesterday from Miami Vice (Universal, 7.28) wasn’t just about tromp-down speed or engineering or a perfectly-tuned engine — that’s standard content in any Mann film. And it wasn’t quite about the sadness and the soul, which is in this film but not in the abundant qualities found in Heat and Collateral and The Insider.
I’m talking about the fumes. The fumes of Miami Vice — the aroma, the grit, the atmospheric stuff, the digital flavor of Dion Beebe’s here-and-there photography — are superb (and sometimes in a realm so special I can’t quite describe it), and this alone makes it the supreme commercial “ride” movie of the summer.
By this I mean my kind of two-hour popcorn movie…an exquisitely configured, not-too-taxing thing for people who are smarter, hipper and more seasoned than the mainstream squealies who went nuts for Pirates 2. It sounds elitist to say this, but…
I’m talking about a crime movie that just roars in and does the job, but lingers on with so many different little moods and tones and accents and side-excursions that, like all first-rate films, it’s clearly up to a lot more than just “story” (and the more I write about movies the less I know what that term really means).
I was never that much into Mann’s Miami Vice back in the mid ’80s, so I wasn’t sitting there yesterday afternoon going “this is new” or “that’s cooler”. Forget Don Johnson and the other guy whose name I’ve never been able to remember, and who I’d rather not look up on the IMDB because that will somehow kill the mood.
Miami Vice is right table-slam now…a combination of big expense (Universal is copping to $135 million), sweat-zone cool and wow photography, all focused on a kind of saxophone-solo story about a couple of Miami detectives looking to burn some very serious drug dealers by way of an undercover operation — a piece of elaborate theatre in which the cops pretend to be bad guys.
The way it’s been shot and cut is mainly about set-up for the first half (or do I mean two-thirds?)…mutterings, maybes, sex, whispers, half-understood’s and the radiant Gong Li, who is back at the top of the list of all-time hotties with this film — and then Big Payoffs happen during the last 30% or 35%.
Colin Farrell’s blonde hair in this film is much better — greasier, more lived in, more in synch with his age and his Irish-ness — than it was in Oliver Stone’s Alexander . Sounds like a mundane nonsequitur, but sometimes the authority of movies can be measured by such things.
Drink a strong cappucino and be well rested before you see this thing — you’ll need to pay close attention. All good movies are calibrated to stay a wee bit in front of what you think you know is going on — if this isn’t done boredom sets in. But my feeling during the first half (and I’m describing this with respect) was along the lines of “whoa, wait a minute…what’d he say? Is this Haiti or…? Rewind those last two lines…oh, I get it…well, most of it.”
Beebe’s photography (like Collateral, most of Vice was shot with a Thomson Viper) is, as you may expect, nervy as shit — at times conventionally appealing, at times “pushed” and flecked with grain, but always sensual and photochemically “real” in a way that never stops being exciting or enticing in some “off” way.
Who, exactly, are Farrell’s Sonny Crockett and Jamie Foxx’s Ricardo Tubbs? Foxx/Tubbs seems like a relatively at-ease guy in love with his lady (Naomie Harris) but Farrell/Crockett is the kind of guy who doesn’t know what kind of guy he is outside of the rush of the job.
That’s what makes his falling in love with Gong Li’s Isabella, the girlfriend of big-time drug lord named Arcangel de Jesus Montoya (played by Luis Tosar, a balding, bearded guy with the most piercing eyes I’ve seen anywhere in a long time), so I-don’t-know-what…odd, surprising, curious, unexpected. A man in the grip of something that won’t let go and is about a lot more than tumescence.
There’s a big heartbreak factor that comes out of the Farrell-Gong relationship at the finale, but let’s be honest and admit it’s not as emotionally touching as Tom Cruise‘s Vincent asking Jamie Foxx if anyone will notice his body sitting on an L.A. Blue Line train in Collateral, and it’s not as touching as Al Pacino holding the dying Robert De Niro’s hand at the end of Heat. That’s one reason why this movie is an 8 on the Mann scale.
The sex scenes (Farrell/Gong’s in particular) have deep-down currents of feeling and longing that other directors wish for before they’re about to shoot their own. Dear God, let me find something between my actors that will make the audience forget the carnality, or at least put it into some kind of spiritual perspective.
All Mann movies are beautifully acted, and each and every supporting Vice actor, no surprise, is a stand-out. The big bad guys (Tosar, John Ortiz) are fearsome. Ciarin Hinds is playing a dullard but it’s good to experience him nonetheless. Barry Shabaka Henley, the jazz-club owner who got shot in the forehead twice by Cruise in Collateral, is good as an upper-level Miami cop. John Hawkes, an anemic-look- ing actor with a scuzzy goatee and an aura of insufficiency, portrays a low-level criminal during the opening few minutes. Domenick Lombardozzi (Find Me Gulity, Entourage) is very fine as another cop.
But please, please see this film for Gong Li, if for no other reason than it will help you forget how poorly she was used as the wicked bitch in Memoirs of a Geisha. This is one of the sexiest and most soulful performances by an actress in any medium in a very long time. I couldn’t quite understand everything she said, to be perfectly honest (her accent is a problem), but ooh, mama, the stuff she exudes during her scenes with Farrell.
I don’t want to get into the story any more than I have. It’s a film about lying — selling them, discovering them and the heavy cost and the smell of them.
I’m going to let this go and see Vice again on Thursday and get into it a bit more on Friday, but no one can watch this film and feel burned. The people who’ve been whispering about this film not being the thing that it could have been haven’t seen it, not really. They haven’t let it in. Or they’re just being hard-assed.
Like I said, the highlight of the set-up, exposition, planning, and planting-the-seeds portion, which is something like 65% to 70%, is the romantic white-water ride taken by Farrell and Gong. I imagine there may be some who will feel a bit lost or uncertain in terms of what’s actually going down at this or that point. I did at times, but there’s something to be said every so often for the feeling of “not knowing.”
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