Amber Tamblyn, on the cusp of turning only 24, has already shown an incredible savvy about mixing commercial fare with independent-minded material that speaks to a somewhat deeper appreciation of nuance and artistry. Her latest film is Stephanie Daley, a delicate diorama about the parallels in anxiety and denial between a teenager accused of murdering her newborn baby and the pregnant forensic psychologist, played by Tilda Swinton, assigned to investigate the case. Shot in wintry upstate New York, and coming during a painful real-life break-up, production left its mark on Tamblyn, who’s also busy prepping her second book of poetry. For the full feature interview on the film, from FilmStew, click here.
Monthly Archives: May 2007
Bobcat Goldthwait Talks Film, Honesty, Affair
A long time before Stephen Colbert and the notion of
“truthiness,” Depeche Mode touched upon some of the same ideas of candor’s
malleability and, conversely, slippery slope perils when, in the early 1990s,
David Gahan sang on Violator, “You’ll
see your problems multiply/When you continually decide/To faithfully pursue/A policy
of truth.” After all, complete and unvarnished honesty can be just like handing
someone a cudgel if they don’t like what you have to say.
unconventional-to-say-the-least romantic comedy Sleeping Dogs Lie,
a surprisingly deeply felt movie that takes a gross-out sex humor nugget and
grinds it down in purposefully awkward fashion into the shag carpet of the real
world. Melinda Page Hamilton stars as Amy, a seemingly normal young girl,
adored by her parents and golden-boy fiancé John (Bryce Johnson). Her future
looks bright until John suggests they tell each other their most intimate
secrets. When Amy finally relents — telling John about a time in college when
she performed fellatio on her dog — her connections to those she loves falls
apart.
content,” (!) as well as drug use and language, is a given, but Sleeping Dogs Lie
isn’t shallowly explicit, unlike so many gross-out teen comedies. Rather, the
movie extrapolates forward from its premise in surprisingly effective if visually
threadbare style. In conjunction with the film’s recent DVD release — from First Look, and including an audio
commentary track from its writer-director — Goldthwait took some time to answer
a few questions via email, and even include a picture of his alleged inspiration. The chat is excerpted below:
Bobcat Goldthwait: It was this guy (below). I can’t resist
him. I’m attracted to smart people, so the glasses really got to me. When he
left me I was just so broken up about it that I had to memorialize it somehow.
relationship before unspoken policies about honesty’s proverbial
line-in-the-sand are hardened? Or is it that in matters sexual, there’s always
going to be a double standard, and/or hang-ups that come back to haunt and
complicate things?
the guise of just being honest. Some people have this idea that disclosing
terrible things makes them a good person — like just by confessing it, you are OK.
I don’t agree with that.
familiar with, or did you cast her through an audition/general meeting?
but as soon as we saw her it was clear that she was far and away the best
actress for the job. I was so afraid that some manager or family member was
going to tell her not to do this movie. Actually, I know at least one of her
close family members tried to talk her out of it by telling her she could never
marry a politician with a scandal like this on her résumé, but thank God she
ignored them and came on board. We could not have made this movie without her.
that the film tangentially raises — that it’s trying to live up to the lies we
tell about ourselves that ultimately makes us better people. What if any
“mistruths” have you told and then tried to live up to, sort of on the fly?
film directing, and what’s the biggest difference or challenge?
being an air traffic controller with monkeys screaming in my ears — it’s a lot
of snap decisions and crazy, but ultimately pretty satisfying. Making a movie
is a little different, but mostly because I only have to look at one monitor at
a time.
Dogs Lie in
two weeks and some change, which must have been a crazy pace. What was the
worst day like?
a lot of laughs every day we were shooting or we never would have made it
through. Any bad example I can give you has a pretty good ending — like, when
we were shooting at one of the producer’s houses and someone unplugged his
fridge without telling him, and everything started to go bad and stink. But
then Bryce (who plays John) took out all the meat and started barbequing it in
the backyard.
awkward, messy confines of the real world, which is a long way from some of the
outlandish comedy for which you’re best known. Is there anything to the notion,
then, of the secret life or tears of a clown, which is to say that many if not
most comedians operate from a place of angst, uncertainty, self-loathing, anger
or some combination thereof?
that you’d like to bestow upon me, thus garnering the site a bump in traffic?
made, but as far as a scoop I guess I can break it here that the during the
filming I was having an on-set affair with Rose McGowan.
Kristin Cavallari Has Her Eyes on You
to make the doughnuts, immediately discover three or four problems in your inbox, before your first shots of caffeine have even really had a chance to work their way through your system, and then you get a ray-of-comic-sunshine email like this, which has you checking your calendar to see if it’s not April 1 instead of May 1:
“What do you get when you mix a reality TV crew, four handheld
digital camcorders and an eye surgeon to the stars (that would be ophthalmologist
Dr. Robert K. Maloney, presumably self-described) with a TV beauty’s pursuit of
20/20 vision and one innovative company willing to document it all? You get the
breakthrough online docu-drama RealityLASIK,
which documents Kristin Cavallari’s pursuit of the latest in vision correction
surgery and her decision to ultimately undergoing [sic] Advanced CustomVue LASIK
with the IntraLase Method.” (parentheses and correction mine)
several years ago on the MTV reality series Laguna
Beach: The Real Orange County, and her more recent role in consoling Nick
Lachey’s jock (allegedly) after the break-up of his marriage to Jessica Simpson,
needs glasses. Or needed, I guess. Then
she decided she was through with that mess — glasses are so 20th century, nerds! But here, let me let a talking head
explain.
approached us with the idea of documenting her own experience as a fun way to
speak to her fans and others considering the procedure,” said Lauren
Kanner, AMO’s global director of consumer market development. “The
medical industry is always looking for ways to earn the public’s trust. The
very nature of a reality-based program is to draw the audience in, and we
thought this was an engaging opportunity for people to live the LASIK surgery
experience through Kristin’s eyes, not ours.”
presumably in a bikini. I’m not sure what qualifies this project as a “breakthrough,”
other than simply the dizzying combination of ingredients — though by this classification,
an omelet consisting of everything in my refrigerator would also be a “breakthrough.”
I do know I’m happy for its existence, though. It’s given me an out-loud laugh,
and staked a strong claim to the most awesome thing of the day. Take that, birthday of Wes Anderson!
For more information, I suppose you can visit the web site by clicking here.
Foxworthy’s Big Night Out
Jeff Foxworthy is clearly a flippin’ genius. He’s parlayed
the whole “You might be a redneck if…” thing into a cottage empire, with books,
comedy CDs and the hugely successful Blue
Collar Comedy Tour special, which in turn spawned its own movie. Because my
TiVo is under strict instructions never to pull anything from CMT, however, I
didn’t realize that he’d also taken up someone on a dare by launching a
Southern-fried In Living Color sketch
comedy show. That’s essentially what Foxworthy’s
Big Night Out is, and it’s apparently fairly popular, at that. Making its
DVD bow on a well-produced two-disc set that includes all of the series’
episodes, as well as bloopers, behind-the-scenes footage and more, Big Night Out is — within the confines
of its demographic pandering, and against almost every instinct in my body — a
mostly winning collection of laughs and musical performances.
last year, with each half-hour show — taped in front of a live studio audience
in
Foxworthy joined onstage by some of country music’s biggest stars. Individuals
and acts like Trace Adkins, Sara Evans, Pat Green, Jack Ingram, Montgomery
Gentry, Kenny Rogers, Hank Williams Jr., Joe Nichols, Blake Shelton, The Warren
Brothers, The Wreckers and Billy Currington all test their comedic talents by
appearing in sketches with Foxworthy and his regular troupe of actors,
consisting of Brooke Dillman, Peter Oldring, Shane Caldwell and Sara Erikson. (Hypnotist
Mark Sweet and comic Kathleen Madigan also make special appearances.) Clearly
the humor hews to the good-natured and countrified; Foxworthy opens each show
with a monologue, where he riffs on road rage, the guitar solo in “Freebird”
and paranoia over one’s health (joking here about his wife disallowing him from
watching “any programs subtitled ‘The Silent Killer’”). He also summarizes the emergence
of Viagra thusly: “Used to be when you were done playing you just went out and
started a garden.”
is in its skits. A Celebrity Deer Hunter
sketch finds guest star Sara Evans battling for promotional time with two self-touting
hosts and their six-barrel shotgun (“Because aiming is for sissies!”), and there’s
also an amusing segment in which a group of guys organize an intervention to curb
their whipped pal’s devotion to his wife, all because it’s further making them look
bad. One of the best sketches, though, inverts the stereotype of the hooting construction
worker; here, girls holler at and lust for men’s pot bellies, deriding the one buff
male who walks by as underfed. The lamest bits, meanwhile, incorporate audience
questions at show’s end; this bit of back-slapping is unnecessary, and often
painful to watch.
stereo track that captures the set’s meager aural demands just fine. A nice
collection of bloopers, pared-down offerings of the best of Foxworthy’s
monologues and a few congratulatory behind-the-scenes featurettes comprise the
slate of bonus material, making for a solid offering that plays across
generational (if not always state) lines. B (Show) B+ (Disc)
Sony Goes (Further) International
In response to the growing importance of the global cinema marketplace, The Hollywood Reporter is, well, reporting that Sony Pictures Entertainment has created an international motion picture
production department, which will be led by Gareth Wigan, vice chairman of the Columbia TriStar Motion Picture Group, and Deborah
Schindler, the former head of Red Om Films who has run the East Coast motion picture production and development operation for Columbia Pictures since 2005.
With the way the film business is expanding these days, I’m frankly a bit shocked to learn that Sony is the only Hollywood studio to maintain stand-alone, local-language production units throughout Europe, Asia and Latin America. International theatrical receipts are of course a bigger and bigger slice of the pie these days (see Night at the Museum, if you doubt). They can make a bonafide hit out of relative under-performers like Troy or Kingdom of Heaven, and help birth sequels for so-so successes like Underworld and Resident Evil. But the under-discussed subtext of that lesson is that there is such a thing as separate foreign tastes (duh), and those distinctions are bubbling to the surface more and more. Why more Hollywood studios don’t try to explicitly cater to those rabid, burgeoning bases, I’m not sure.
The Majestic
It’s the beginning of the month and I’m fleshing out the archive a bit, though in admittedly slow-hand fashion. Next on the docket: this review of The Majestic, originally published upon its theatrical release in 2001. Why now? Let’s say… because I just saw Jim Carrey and Jenny McCarthy having sex in the hot tub which my balcony overlooks. Does that work? Did that get your attention? OK, settle down. On to the review:
The elastic-faced Jim Carrey, who started his career on Fox’s sketch comedy show In Living Color and first sprung to cinematic prominence in Ace Ventura: Pet Detective by talking with his butt cheeks and sporting a pompadour that would shame both an “Uptown Girl”-era Billy Joel and a modern day Chris Isaak, has been on a slow and steady quest to get serious. His first two dramatic feature film leads, The Truman Show and Man on the Moon, brought mixed results. For the most part critically lauded, both as a whole and with respect to his performances, the films secured Carrey Golden Globe Best Actor wins from the Hollywood Foreign Press Association (though the latter was curiously in the comedic category, something Carrey himself poked fun at in his acceptance speech). Yet each film was met with degrees of indifference at the box office, as well as virtual Academy Award lock-outs. What, then, to make of these mixed signals?, the owner of a shuttered, crumbling movie house (“He m Jesti” reads the marquee), is convinced the young man before him is his long-thought-dead son Luke. And in fact Peter <I>is</I> a dead ringer for Luke, so who is he to argue? The return of this small town war hero, missing for almost 10 years, reinvigorates the entirety of Lawson (save one surly small fry cook), and <B>Harry and “Luke,” who remembers movies but not his own life, go about restoring the theater</B>. At first unsure what to make of his situation, Luke soon settles in to Lawson’s comfortably paced lifestyle and community, even reconnecting with the beautiful Adele Stanton (Laurie Holden, dolled up to look like a cross between Grace Kelly and Veronica Lake), his girlfriend prior to the war.<BR><BR>Meanwhile, however, government agents are searching for Peter Appleton, convinced he’s an on-the-lam communist. They eventually find him and — faced with a lack of corroboration for his predicament — Peter/Luke, who himself <B>admits that he “never saw the percentage in being a man of conviction,”</B> must testify before the HUAC, deciding what to say and whether to name the names of people he doesn’t even remember.<I><BR><BR><B>The Majestic</B></I><B> is warm, well-meaning and quietly paced, a mannered and impeccably ordered Capra-esque tale of self-searching. Why then does it feel so listless for much of its running time?</B> Well, first and foremost the film is steeped in such indolent, overly familiar metaphor that it boggles the mind. <B>Darabont, for the first time not working from his own script adaptation, cedes his better judgement to the obvious (and overly idealistic) instincts of the screenplay</B>. He and writer Michael Sloane are longtime friends, and perhaps this led to a more rose-colored take on the material, but <B><I>The Majestic</I> is astonishingly inert</B>.<BR><BR>So, in a perfect world, <I>could</I> it have worked? Absolutely. Those who doubt Jim Carrey’s credibility as a capable, fully functional dramatic lead don’t fully recognize his talent. Carrey has a deep and rich reservoir of pain (best captured here, believe it or not, in a bar scene in which a despondent Peter spills his troubles to both the barkeep and a stuffed monkey). But <I>The Majestic</I>‘s script doesn’t fully exploit Carrey’s abilities. Much of the film is presented naturalistically, yet Carrey is a reactive figure on the surface frequently, and underneath always (even when heading up the renovation of The Majestic), until the very end of the movie. Given the circumstances of his amnesia, Peter/Luke would seem to be a much more inquisitive character, and if this isn’t going to be the case, that needs to be explained and explored in detail.<BR><BR>Since it’s not, however, <I>The Majestic</I> is less the story of one man’s self-realization and more like <I>The Accidental Hero</I>; <B>the dots on Peter/Luke’s emotional journey simply don’t connect</B>. So the search continues. It’s not for lacking of trying, but Carrey still hasn’t found what he’s looking for. <B>(Warner Bros., PG, 152 minutes)</B></p>
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Le Corbeau, Examined
As previously mentioned, the lit department filings here at Shared Darkness are relatively rare, but one tome that French film fans in particular will likely want to check out is author Judith Mayne’s same-titled exploration of Henri-Georges Clouzot’s 1943 debut film Le Corbeau, part of the superb French Film Guide series from the University of Illinois Press. Despite being under German rule at the time, the French film industry survived and in fact in many ways thrived, and Mayne examines the domination of the industry by Continental Films, the Nazi-owned arts company for which Clouzot worked. The author asks, crucially, how such a film came to be made at such a time, evoking as it does the intense paranoia of an era in which anonymous letters denouncing friends and neighbors were encouraged by the German occupier. It’s a quite good read, studiously researched and faithfully annotated. To purchase the book via Half.com, click here.