an interesting piece in today’s Los Angeles Times focusing on Harvey Weinstein’s go-for-broke strategywith regards to garnering Academy Awards attention for Emilio Estevez’s Bobby. The gist of the piece is about how Weinstein is flogging a Screen Actors Guild nomination for Best Ensemble Cast — the new Crash model for darkhorse success — and hoping that, along with TV and print ads touting positive rank-and-file audience reaction, yields some Oscar noms.
Though we’ll doubtlessly be subjected to the trotting out of both Charlie and Martin Sheen, in an effort to score some sort of familial goodwill, there won’t be any Bobby surprise upset at the Golden Globes — the competition in the dramatic film category is too strong. Still, don’t discount Weinstein’s shrewd (and devoted) strategy, or place the film on ice just yet. I’ve said before that Bobby is basically a movie that’s as good as one allows it to be, meaning that as things get worse in Iraq and abroad, people are more receptive to the plaintive chords of hope that Bobby strikes. Any Oscar nominations would be reflective of this.
Still, I have a friend who can’t fathom any continued awards talk, and rants that Bobby is, and I quote, “TV-level filmmaking… like Cold Case: The Movie. It’s all two-person set-ups, lacking cinematic scope and nuance.” And for the record, he voted for Bush once, but not a second time…
Perth as “Singapore’s
answer to Taxi Driver,” and its
artwork — complete with a yellow cab and its cigarette smoking, blank-faced
proprietor looming in the foreground — further induces feelings of queasy
disconnection with society at large. It’s a comparative swing for the fences,
naturally, and thus a bit of an over-sell. A better leaping off point of comparison, however, might well be 1997’s
Korean import Audition, which spent a
lot of time working in the murky interstices of discontented personal lives
before taking a headlong plunge into shocking violence and torture.
Directed by the singularly monikered Djinn — a gambit that’s
worked out OK thus far for McG, but considerably less well for Tarsem — Perth centers on Harry Lee (Lim Kay
Tong), a Singaporean part-time security guard and taxi driver who wants nothing
more to do with the fast-paced, status-driven society that’s left him a step behind,
socio-economically speaking. Harry’s wife (Liu Qiulian) is cheating on him, and
his dependence on the bottle is leaving him less and less satisfied. His dream,
randomly enough, is to move to the titular Western Australian coast town, but
his attempts to migrate are complicated when he hooks up with some gangster
types and takes on a job ferrying prostitutes about town. The situation becomes
increasingly unstable when he takes an interest in one of the girls in
particular, Vietnamese Mai (Ivy Cheng). This reawakens in Harry a certain amount
of long-missing tenderness, but will his dark and dangerous attempts at
personal redemption pay off or merely bloodily pull down more of those around
him?
Djinn composes his film in woozy, saturated fashion, and with
a heavy reliance on close-ups, but he still packs his frames with telling
detail, and occasionally utilizes quick inserts of domestic objects to convey a
grounded sense of setting. He also deftly deploys a small company of vivid
supporting characters — misogynistic and racist fellow cabbies, quietly
colorful local thugs — who give the movie a well-rounded vibe, along with its
cannily mixed Cantonese, Mandarin, English and local dialects. The film goes a
long, long way toward establishing Harry as a reprehensible character before attempting
to redeem him, and it’s a credit to Tong’s fine performance that we remain
engaged if not totally sympathetic. In this way, Perth also
reminded me a bit of Battle of Heaven
in its focus on wounded souls, though that film ends on a note of violence a
lot closer to Perth’s
midway point.
Perth
is presented in a solid if saturated anamorphic widescreen transfer, with so-so
Dolby digital 5.1 surround sound and DTS surround sound audio tracks. (Djinn’s
reliance on source audio and lack of foleyed effects mars a handful of scenes.) Djinn also sits for a somewhat tinnily recorded audio commentary track in which
he cites influences as diverse as Lee Tamahori’s Once
Were Warriors (which I can see) and Don
Quixote (which I have more trouble visualizing); more engaging is the
erudite Tong, who also sits for his own solo commentary track. Doling out
production anecdotes (the production photographer is drafted to play a random character
who’s dog Harry steals) alongside thoughts on Harry’s quiet inner rage, the
thoughtful and avuncular Tong serves up as pleasant an aural guide as could be
imagined for a film as grim as Perth. He also contributes his thoughts to six minutes of deleted scenes. An 11-minute set design featurette on art
director Andy Heng’s work rounds things out, along with the movie’s original
theatrical trailer and previews for other Tartan releases. B (Movie) B+ (Disc)
Writer-director-turned-burgeoning actor Kevin Smith was making press rounds recently for Catch and Release, and took some time to talk about his involvement in the fourth installment of the Die Hard franchise, Live Free and Die Hard.
“I’m the only person in Die Hard who talks and doesn’t shoot
somebody,” says Smith, somewhat predictably, of his role. “It’s that
role in the action movie where you provide a bunch of information that
they need to head into act three. …This could all change, mind you. By the time they get in
the editing room, they might be like, ‘He sucked. Yank him out.’ But as
it stands now, in the script and as I shot it, they talk about me a lot
and then you finally meet me. And I provide a lot of information about
the villain.”
“What’s nice about working on those big God-awful, expensive Hollywood
movies is that they have so many writers they don’t even notice if
you’re one of them,” Smith continues. “So I got there and I was just like, ‘I wrote myself
a one-page monologue,’ and I got to deliver it. It was hysterical. Like,
they let me do it. Bruce Willis is like, ‘Dude, that’s a good speech.’
And so, you know, they totally went for it. So that was kind of cool. …They were kind of
riff-friendly, but there was one motto they kept
saying, which was, ‘Keep it Die Hard.’ So you can’t get in there and do a Jay and Silent Bob-type
monologue. You have to kind of make it germane to the movie. So I don’t
wind up giving a funny speech. I wind up giving a very paranoid
Joe-Pesci-in-JFK-type speech, which was fun.”
an interesting piece in today’s Los Angeles Times focusing on Harvey Weinstein’s go-for-broke strategy with regards to garnering Academy Awards attention for Emilio Estevez’s Bobby. The gist of the piece is about how Weinstein is flogging a Screen Actors Guild nomination for Best Ensemble Cast — the new Crash model for darkhorse success — and hoping that, along with TV and print ads touting positive rank-and-file audience reaction, yields some Oscar noms.
Perth as “