Daily Archives: October 25, 2007

Mr. Untouchable

Film Reviews

Harlem’s notorious Nicky Barnes, an adolescent junkie turned
multimillionaire drug lord — and a figure played by Cuba Gooding, Jr.
in the forthcoming American Gangster — gets a nonfiction workout in
director Marc Levin’s engrossing documentary, which takes its audience
deep inside the heroin industry of the 1970s. One of the most powerful
black drug kingpins in New York City history, Barnes reached such
heights of arrogance that he actually posed for a cover story in the
New York Times Magazine (below) touting his status as a Teflon Don. Soon after,
it all came crumbling down. Slapped with a life sentence, Barnes would
eventually seek payback, cooperating with law enforcement by turning
his organization inside out.

Avarice and revenge are the two main throughlines here, and they pulse
with a quicksilver energy unmatched in many genre features that tread
similar narrative ground. Candid interviews with criminal syndicate
deputies like Joseph “Jazz” Hayden and Leon “Scrap” Batts (as well as common-law wife Thelma Grant, who comes off as a Imelda
Marcos-type figure) set the
scene, painting a convincing portrait of prison as little more than
“crime school.” Various attorneys, police detectives, and newspapermen
of the era, meanwhile, help tie up loose chronological ends in fine
fashion. Still, Mr. Untouchable has the chief benefit of being told in
the voice of its subject. Though interviewed in shadow, and now
70-plus, Barnes still has an arresting presence; he quotes Dietrich
Bonhoeffer and Machiavelli at length as the inspirations for his
business. Some of his air-quote insights are rather silly (“There was
something about pure cocaine and young women that held an inevitable attraction
for me…”), and if Barnes is additionally delusional and espouses seemingly incongruous value
sets, the film still shows you, in fascinating fashion, how he comes to
these contradictions honestly, out of self-preservation. For the review in its original capsule form, from CityBeat, click here and scroll down.

Joan Chen on Twin Peaks, New Film

Interviews

With her key supporting role in Ang Lee’s new film, Lust, Caution, and a definitive DVD set of the groundbreaking Twin Peaks hitting stores next week, there will be plenty of opportunity to glimpse Joan Chen on screens both small and large this fall. And that’s fine with the multi-hyphenate 46-year-old.

“I think it’s great,” Chen says. “In China
they’re forever stuck on Little Flower,
which was a film I did when I was 17. So when people (see me), they’re still
like, ‘Little Flower!’ Here, it’s
mostly Twin Peaks.
I mean, The Last Emperor is a great
movie, but I think more people saw Twin Peaks, and people who followed it are so staunch. When it first came out it really was special. Never had
anything been done on TV like that. It was very exciting to do something so
different, and to know that TV could be that way. There is more sort of
copy-ish stuff now, and I think American TV is doing very well.”

Chen — who helmed 2000’s Autumn in New York, and may also soon be tackling another film behind the camera, an adaptation of a story from Lust, Caution author Eileen Chang, ironically — has writer-director Michael Almereyda’s Tonight at Noon in the can, and also just recently finished another film, titled Seventeen, in her native China. “I play a mother from this extremely remote mountain village,” says Chen, “losing her son to the big movement
to the city. The director is 25, and everybody who worked on the film is
like 20. They’re like different species; it was fun.”

On Zodiac’s DVD Controversy

Ephemera, Irritations

The two-disc director’s cut DVD of David Fincher’s Zodiac that’s being listed for sale on Amazon with a release date of January 8, 2008, touts a running time of 162 minutes, yet the awards screeners for the film — listed on the cover as being the director’s cut — come advertised with a 158-minute running time, which is the same length as the movie’s theatrical exhibition. So what gives? It’s a typo; the awards screener does indeed run 162 minutes, adding four minutes to the original cut. Still, that seems a pretty miniscule splitting of hairs for a dense, cerebral crime drama — who went to the mat for the studio over four minutes?

Advance Thoughts on Fred Claus

Musings

Good news on Fred Claus, the re-teaming of Wedding Crashers director David Dobkin and star Vince Vaughn, releasing November 9 from Warner Bros.

the first trailer for the film really underwhelms, what with its rather rote slapstick and ninja elves, the movie is actually a lot… well, at least a good bit smarter than those clips indicate, providing a vehicle for Vaughn’s goosed-up, passive-aggressive, chatterbox patter, yes, but also some genuine and pleasant surprises in narrative direction, including a cameo from Frank Stallone. (Yes, seriously…) I was skeptical about Vaughn’s charms being able to sustain this movie, but Dobkin is a gifted, intuitive comedic director, and not just for spurning I Now Pronounce You Chuck & Larry.