I commented a few days back on the brilliant, evocative new trailer for Oliver Stone’s W., and it’s now up and running in chopped-and-diced form in 30-second television spots, including on MSNBC and CNN. There’s a new line not glimpsed in the theatrical/online long-form cut (“I don’t understand why you’re bringing this up at lunch,” says President Bush says to Vice President Cheney when the latter starts talking about the potential for an anthrax attack), but perhaps most fascinating is the inclusion of voiceover and text narration that sells the film as “based on the unbelievable true story of George W. Bush, and the trillion dollar mistake.”
Wait… which trillion dollars, again? I know it’s not the Iraq War (which currently sits at around $585 billion, but runs as high as $3 trillion when factoring in long-term costs). And it’s not the total federal deficit, which has ballooned to $10 trillion-plus under Bush. Oh, right… it’s that other $1 trillion or so ripped from taxpayers’ futures, in the form of the Congressional economic bail-out package. Put a saddle on this guy. I can’t recall any other agitated-entertainment promotional campaign — and this includes Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 — so openly, contemptuously bagging on a public figure, and incorporating up-to-minute material. Of course, I can’t really recall anyone else who has so brought it upon themselves and deserved it, either. Regardless, it’s the right campaign to run for W., really, stripping the bark off its own subject of focus. This push has me rethinking my previous assessment that Stone’s movie is financially doomed; talking to a few friends and colleagues recently opened my mind to at least the possibility that the filmgoing public could be receptive to a cathartic dismissive experience, something I hadn’t previously considered.
Amazing. Fascinating. Jaw-dropping. I can’t believe these actually exist. It’s almost worth buying some stickers in bulk and taking a silver Sharpie to the word “thank.”
In the realm of straight-to-video, almost more than anywhere else in the movie business, ironically, topicality and zeitgeist matter. The margins are thinner, so being able to reliably turn out a particular genre “base” is quite important; there’s not the muscle of a $35 million-plus P&A budget to bail you out. Ergo, in these troubled times in which the term “bad guy” remains somewhat vague and shadowy, enter Tortured, a moral-quandry suspense drama about the psychological fraying of an undercover cop as he works a domestic underworld case.
Going by the name Jimmy Vaughn, a young, ambitious war veteran and FBI agent (Cole Hauser) undertakes a mission infiltrating a long-established underworld gang run by a mysterious, Keyser Soze-like figure named Ziggy, who has evaded the federal government for decades. Despite the warnings of caution from his bureau chief father Jack (James Cromwelll), Vaughn feels he has the strength and skills to take Ziggy down. What he doesn’t expect is the brutal initiation rites into Ziggy’s grim, violent, paranoid world. After enduring beatings and interrogations to prove trustworthy and gain admittance, Vaughn receives his task — to extract information via torture from Ziggy’s kidnapped accountant Archie Green (Laurence Fishburne), whom Ziggy alleges stole money from him.
From here, Vaughn’s double life starts to truly unravel. Already beset by doubts, his longtime girlfriend Becky (Emmanuelle Chriqui, displaying a fleeting bit of side-boob) leaves him, and the FBI psychiatrist (Kevin Pollack) he’s seeing recommends aborting the mission. Still, Vaughn plugs ahead. Horrific twists and unknown old alliances finally emerge as he dives deeper into the criminal underbelly, leading to a grim finale with lasting consequences for all involved.
Tortured is written and directed by Nolan Lebovitz (Dr. Benny, a 2003 “gynecological comedy” that as best I can determine went undistributed domestically), and it on the surface would seem a fairly disposable and anonymous slice of action drama. The cramped production schedule is evidenced in the tight framing and cramped visual scheme for the film, a lot of the who-knows-what inter-agency scenes early on come across as a bit pat, and the examples by which the movie raises points about the nature of how torture warps those who commit it are fairly boilerplate (post-coital arguments with a teary Becky, nightmarish visions of Archie talking about his family). But the film is also fairly well cast (Jon Cryer and James Denton also have small roles), and peppered with some smart dialogue. It’s ironic that the moral inquiry portion of the movie (and the reason for its double-meaning title) doesn’t play nearly as well as the more traditional, Donnie Brasco-type drama, which is nicely layered. A coiled ball of swallowed feeling, Hauser is so-so in the lead role. Lebovitz, though, effectively surrounds him, and also works in a couple nice twists to keep things lively and engaging.
Housed in a regular Amray case housed in a cardboard slipcover, Tortured comes presented in 1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen, with audio tracks in English, Thai, French and Spanish, and a vast array of subtitles in those languages plus Korean and Chinese. The disc’s sole bonus feature is a 19-minute making-of featurette which includes interviews with almost all the chief players, behind-the-scenes and on-screen. Lebovitz makes an articulate case for what interested and inspired him to make the movie in the first place, and Fishburne talks about having done another movie in which he doled out torture (that would be 21, actually), and wanting to experience the other side of the moral equation. To purchase the movie on DVD via Amazon, click here. B (Movie) B- (Disc)
So because very narrow-minded and unimaginative people love to rent Hollywood as a piñata, filmmaker Fernando Meirelles’ Blindness — which imagines a mysterious epidemic that causes people to see nothing but fuzzy white light, resulting in a collapse of social order in an unnamed American city — is being protested by blind people. “The movie portrays blind people as monsters, and I believe it to be
a lie,” said Marc Maurer, president of the Baltimore-based National
Federation of the Blind. “Blindness doesn’t turn decent people into
monsters.”
The organization plans to protest the movie — based on the 1995 novel by Nobel Prize winner Jose Saramago, and starring Julianne Moore, Mark Ruffalo and Danny Glover, among others — at 75 theaters around the country when it’s released Friday by Miramax
Films.
Blind people and their advocates will hand out fliers and carry signs.
Among the slogans: “I’m not an actor. But I play a blind person in real
life.”
Stupid blind people… protesting the movie without even seeing it. Sigh…
Yesterday was a real bitch, schedule and work-load wise, but yielded some good experiences and future nuggets for the coming days and weeks. The most surreal part of the day, though, was leaving the Four Seasons Hotel in Beverly Hills, and running into Pat Boone. Like, literally. He was a-comin’ in through the out door.
