Smokin’ Aces, which melds Tarantino’s penchant for
chatty-cool characters to the sort of stylized mayhem and balletic
action that keeps the Squib Manufacturers of America quite happy. For the full review, from FilmStew, click here.
Daily Archives: January 26, 2007
Lynch Gives a “Wootch”
David Lynch is flitting to and fro in support of his latest film, Inland Empire, and while this brief interview from AVClub.com, mostly full of general query softballs, doesn’t offer much in the way of new material, it does proffer the proper pronunciation (according to Lynch) of the city of Lodz, Poland, as well as his thoughts on both transcendental meditation and sound design. For the straight Q&A, click here.
On The Amateurs, Now Moguls
For several years, when I was editor-in-chief at the Los Angeles paper Entertainment Today, the venerable Brad Schreiber covered the Palm Springs International Film Festival for us in his bi-weekly column, Development Hell, and did a slam-bang job, it’s worth mentioning.
Two
hours from the city, the Palm Springs Festival has earned its international status by way of including the majority of films
offered up for nomination for the Best Foreign Film Oscar at the Academy Awards. This year’s festival, its 18th incarnation, screened 254 films from 74 countries, and offered plenty of star-gazing into the clear, desert night sky, as well as at its
annual awards gala, where honorees included Sydney Pollack, Kate Winslet, Todd Field, Cate Blanchett, composer Philip Glass and Babel director Alejandro
Gonzalez Inarritu.
Schreiber caught over 30 films, but it was his thoughts on writer-director Michael Traeger’s The Amateurs, which has since been retitled The Moguls, that caught my eye. This film has had its own hellish post-development track, well chronicled, but this was my first run-in with someone who’d seen it firsthand, in completed form. To wit, Schreiber’s review, redacted below:
“Perhaps
it is not surprising that the release of The Amateurs has been long in
the making. It is, after all, a sweet comedy about pornography and its premise
is enough to melt the synapses of your average filmgoer. To be honest, we in
America have a strong puritanical streak, despite the accessibility of adult
entertainment and its remunerative power.
It
is just that financial lure that guides loveable loser Andy Sargentee (Jeff
Bridges) to hit upon the idea of gathering a group of friends in the bucolic
town of Butterfield Faces to make a blue movie and cash in. Andy’s ex Thelma
(Jeanne Tripplehorn) bears his lack of money, discipline and goals, even when he
shows up to give their son a basketball, one that Andy pretends, unsuccessfully,
is signed by Michael Jordan.
Andy is
good-natured. But he just seems incapable of doing anything. He brings in on his
scheme his closeted gay friend Moose (Ted Danson), nerdy locals Barney
Macklehatton (Tim Blake Nelson) and Otis (William Fichtner), who claims he just
wants to watch, and thus, is made an executive producer. There’s lovelorn Helen Tatelbaum (Glenne Headley),
cinematographer Emmett (Patrick Fugit) and Some Idiot (Joe Pantoliano) who is
writing the script, such as it is. “Hollywood has a lot of people like me,” he
trumpets, “who are multi-gifted.”
The
wrong vernacular is the least of their troubles. Learning it is not enough to
simply get a group to pony up $2,000 apiece, Andy has to entice two girls
working at a fast food restaurant and then a few black guys who he assumes are
well-endowed. This reverse-racism results in a shockingly funny argument in a
café and The Amateurs, written and directed by Michael Traeger, certainly
has its charms in portraying the doltish production of a porn flick into goofy
fun, rather than a seamy indictment of society’s underbelly. Pantoliano is
hilarious in his conviction as a great screenwriter and artist and sad sack
Bridges is priceless when reading aloud narrative like, “Boris gives it to
Bianca in the butt as she defuses the bomb.”
The
film is not without its moments best left on a cutting room floor, including a
final product that looks a lot better than it would have, based on the group’s
ineptitude. Talented performers like Headley and Lauren Graham are
underutilized. And there’s a feel-good ending that pushes our acceptance of this
whole porno-as-empowerment premise. But Bridges, as always, is an actor who
provides not only believability but a cohesiveness. He struggles to put into
words his benevolence when he tells his collaborators, earnestly, touchingly, “I’ll give anything if someone can get some destiny from this.” And there is
something very desirable about wholesome, smalltown folks who refuse to see
anything wrong with filming sex in their local Softy Freeze.”
For more of Schreiber’s writing, check out his site, A Critical Moment, by clicking here.
The Scars of Oscars
Nikki Finke’s piece in L.A. Weekly, “The Scars of Oscars,” correctly assays that Hollywood is agenda driven, and awards circuit voting is as often about the demerits of certain films as all the positive aspects, but I’m not sure that it correctly pinpoints the reason for Dreamgirls‘ demise, if that can be said of a film with eight Oscar nominations.
Finke blames things on Hollywood jealousy of producer David Geffen, and reasons, “Individually, none of the Oscar voters would dare take on David. But there’s safety in numbers, so they figure, what the hell.” I’m not buying. I think it was simply a case of that film being outpaced in the home stretch. Babel had multi-culti support, and could be both a sociopolitical statement as much as an artistic one, at least in the minds of voters. Widely embraced by both critics groups and audiences predisposed to respectively attend, The Queen and The Departed (the latter despite a weak campaign) were too good to ignore, and the shrewdly marketed Little Miss Sunshine was easily slotted as this year’s indie darling/belle of the ball, a la The Full Monty. The remaining slot, then, came down to a resurgent Clint Eastwood’s Letter from Iwo Jima — would it be too of a piece, sociopolitically speaking, with Babel? — and Dreamgirls. The fact is, on the latter, there was simply a lot of noise about there not being enough substance, enough “movie,” in the last third of the film. It didn’t stick with you. And while Letters might not either, except for Ken Wantanabe’s performance, in a nomination dogfight, you can’t bet against the war movie. Maybe some voters resented the manner in which the film was being rammed down their collective throats as a breathless inevitability (I’m sure all the right restaurants were booked for celebratory lunches), but I don’t think that’s necessarily a David Geffen problem. That’s a hype > reality problem…
Venus
Venus, a rich, bawdy and yet ultimately moving tale of an aging actor’s infatuation with an irascible friend’s much younger niece. It’s in essence a movie about life’s indignities, and how they visit
and prey upon both young and old, frequently in indiscriminate fashion.
Yet Venus never succumbs to mopey dramatic tropes, or indeed, even much melancholy; it’s spry, and a heck of a lot of fun. What you so strongly feel while watching the film — even if
you’re unfamiliar with the rest of O’Toole’s filmography, or him as a
personality — is the force and weight of a life lived with full-tilt
passion. For the full review, from FilmStew, click here. For a feature piece on the film, meanwhile, click here.
Suzanne’s Diary for Nicholas
Suzanne’s Diary for
Nicholas costars real-life couple Christina Applegate and Jonathon Schaech,
and explores parallels between the lives of its in-bloom characters, teasing
things up into a lucky-to-have-loved chorus.
book editor Kate Wilkinson (Kathleen Rose Perkins) is a chronic workaholic who
thinks she’s finally found the perfect man in the form of author Matt Harrison
(Schaech). But on one of the most important nights of their relationship, Matt
suddenly ends their affair without explanation. (They’re not in the middle of a
war, alas, so this small nod to Graham Greene goes mostly un-highlighted.) Soon
after, a devastated Kate receives a package from Matt containing a diary
written by his wife Suzanne (Applegate) to their unborn son. Reading it, Kate
gets drawn into Suzanne’s tender, stirring story — about a Martha’s Vineyard marriage
between a housepainter who dreams of being a writer and a female doctor who
yearns to be a mother but it hamstrung by a serious heart condition. Slowly but
surely, Kate sees certain connections to her own life.
is that it’s reductionist emotional pabulum — cookie-cutter fare (except maybe
with better-looking people) made only to conform to expectation and give us a
mirror image of our own wishes and desires that we’re too lazy to act upon. On
this charge, Suzanne’s Diary for Nicholas,
broadcast on CBS two springs ago, is essentially guilty. Yet by the same token,
it’s also decently rendered and acted, a sort of down-market version of The Notebook, if you will. Director
Richard Friedenberg is a veteran of this type of material, and accordingly
pulls out all the stops. There isn’t much thought to a larger canvas, but the
movie’s achingly sincere purity of spirit makes for a passable tearjerker.
16×9 televisions, the film comes with a Dolby digital 2.0 stereo track. Both
are entirely adequate, as there’s not much in the way of grandeur to inject
into the narrative. There are unfortunately no supplemental bonus materials to
complement the DVD release, which is puzzling only insomuch as the title of
such ridiculous ownership would seem to beg for some sort of interview or chat
with James Patterson. Alas… no. C (Movie) C- (Disc)