I’m not a cutting-edge-fashion type of guy, as my previously stated hatred of Ugg boots and the phenomenon of giant, welder’s-masks-as-sunglasses both attest. The catwalk? Vogue‘s annual September issue? These things mean little to me. Give me functionality, clean lines and crisp angles, and nothing too ridiculously tight or baggy, and I’m fine. In movies, though, I can appreciate outlandish style a bit more, so even given my typical avoidance of the overly trendy, it was no great pain or stretch for me to get into Fashion in Film, which explores the history of the costumes, couture and glamour icons that have helped forever transform the look of screen entertainment.
Exploring how integral fashion is to the filmmaking process, this documentary looks at the complementary and competitive relationship between Hollywood and the fashion industry. It tells how celebrities have toppled the “supermodel,” bringing fashion from the big screen to the pages of magazines like Glamour and Vogue; it even spotlights some, like Sarah Jessica Parker, who have created their own styles and brands for public consumption. Interviewees include everyone from models and actors (Tyson Beckford, Amanda Bynes, Jennifer Beals, Maria Menounos) to costume designers (Sharen Davis, Deborah Nadoolman Landis, Adrianne Phillips, Michael Kaplan), high-end fashion designers and even director Brett Ratner. Films discussed include The Devil Wears Prada, Atonement, Legally Blonde, Clueless, American Gigolo, 27 Dresses, Flashdance and more.
The title’s brevity (it runs just over 55 minutes) is both somewhat of a drawback as well as a selling point, actually; while some would no doubt prefer a much more in-depth tilling of the movie’s subject matter, this running time provides a glossy, entertaining overview for the more casual audience, and leaves them full, appreciative, and perhaps wanting just a bit more. One thing that could have been a bit more explored, certainly, is the relationship between designers and actors and actresses diving headlong into the annual awards-circuit craziness. Maybe that would have risked too much, though, biting the hand that feeds.
Part of “Starz Inside,” a series of original documentary specials crafted for cable TV, Fashion in Film is unrated, comes housed in a regular plastic Amaray case, and is presented in 1.78:1 anamorphic widescreen, with a Dolby surround 2.0 audio track. Apart from a small clutch of trailers, there are no supplemental features or stitch-along sewing advice. You’ll have to make do on your own, there. Nevertheless, to purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here. C+ (Movie) C+ (Disc)
On June 1, legendary director David Lynch will debut Interview Project, a 121-part (yes, you read that right) web-exclusive documentary series featuring three- to five-minute portraits of ordinary Americans from all over the country. Commissioned by Lynch and compiled by a team of filmmakers who criss-crossed the United States gathering personal histories both humorous and heartrending, the series will unveil a new installment every three days for a full calendar year, until next June. EW.com has an exclusive sneak peek at the first subject.
Sony Pictures Entertainment CEO Michael Lynton has gone and mildly stepped in it, confirming corporate bias and general cluelessness by saying, at a breakfast panel yesterday co-hosted by the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University and The New Yorker, “I’m a guy who doesn’t who doesn’t see anything good having come from the Internet, period.”
Well, of course not. Is there a studio executive who isn’t, at core, a status quo guy or gal? To a degree, this is why studios can drive such an unreasonable bargain with respect to online residual payments to artists. It’s not because they’re negotiating from a position of ultimate strength, as some think; it’s because, pushing on 15 years into the Internet Age, they’re still uncertain — scared shitless, really — of new business models, and would rather just put their fingers in their ears and make noises instead of making choices and infrastructure improvements that move entertainment consumption options forward in a truly progressive manner. They know change lurks out there, so they’ll protect profit percentages in draconian fashion and just bide their time, maybe hoping some governmental underwriting (in the form of copyright extension and embedded anti-piracy software with federal broadband legislation) eventually kicks in.
The case of Kim Basinger, actress, is a curious one. She’s a former model who’s appeared on screen in some undeniable clunkers, and at times exudes all of the woodenness of a teetotaling, midwestern Kiwanis Club secretary forced into giving some sort of public presentation for which she is ill-prepared. (And let’s not even talk about Cool World.) And yet Basinger is also an Oscar winner, for L.A. Confidential. Her latest film is While She Was Out, a harebrained, stalking, I-am-woman-hear-me-roar thriller, the sort of which would have starred Ashley Judd if it had somehow been produced during the late 1990s.
Basinger stars as Della Myers, a suburban housewife and mother of two who lives under the thumb of her abusive husband Kenneth (Craig Sheffer). After running out for some last-minute shopping on Christmas Eve, Della gets caught up in a web of violence, as she’s mercilessly stalked by a multi-culti
group of malicious thugs, fronted by Chuckie (Lukas Haas). Armed with only
the will to survive and a little red toolbox (perhaps a fairy tale signifier?) of knick-knacks from her wrecked car, Della fights for her
life through the night in an effort to get back to see her children
again.
Executive produced, strangely enough, by Guillermo del Toro, While She Was Out is perhaps most notable in that it’s written and directed by a female, Susan Montford, which is unusual for a slice of such seemingly uncomplicated genre fare. Unfortunately, any notions of gender-infused subtlety and/or interesting narrative re-framing dissipate almost on contact, given that the movie starts from such a weird, emotionally heightened place. Not to belittle domestic violence, but Sheffer comes in and starts badgering and menacing Basinger from frame one. This actually has the weird effect of undercutting a good bit of the rest of the drama, because there then follows a laboriously extended, almost real-time set-up sequence of 15 to 20 minutes in which Della drives to the mall, sees an accident en route, smokes a cigarette while taking a call from a friend, has trouble parking, walks into the mall, goes shopping, runs into an old acquaintance who makes some snide, cutting remarks… you get the picture. It’s only when Della finally gets back outside that the movie picks up something resembling downhill momentum, when Chuckie and his crew acost Della, blocking her car.
That said, after this dreadfully strange and ill-paced opening, While She Was Out doesn’t totally overstay its welcome, running a mere 86 minutes. The problem is that
what’s there feels much longer and stretched-out than it should, since there’s so little going on underneath the surface, and all sorts of details crucial to the story’s construction don’t match up. The mall is so crowded that a parking space is almost impossible to come by, yet when Della exits the place is utterly abandoned. It also defies logic that Santa Claus is working late, and that the old college chum Della bumps into says she’s out to… get her hair done, on Christmas Eve?
These are but a few of the incongruities on display. And the dialogue is, across the board,
so stultifyingly absurd that almost instantly the movie seems designed as some strange, coded drinking game. If you aren’t laughing out loud in disbelief when Chuckie says, “You slipped an incendiary note underneath my windshield wipers, which is an invitation to war to me and my soldiers!” you most likely will be when one of his snarling cohorts steps in some mud and then exclaims, “Shit, our new kicks — they all dirty now!” The shadow-saturated, indifferently rendered cat-and-mouse moves of the film’s third act are meant to be given a weird, left-field charge by Chuckie’s incrementally increasing admiration for Della’s homicidal inventiveness as picks off members of his crew, but instead it just all feels like the playing out of a string. Through all this ridiculousness, though, Basinger actually manages to inject a credible sense of warped, wounded adrenaline — of sad-eyed victim reluctantly becoming the victimizer — into the movie (more on this below), certainly something that exists on a higher plane than anything else in the narrative proper.
While She Was Out comes to DVD in a regular plastic Amaray case in turn stored in a complementary cardboard slipcover. It’s presented in 1.78:1 anamorphic widescreen, with a 5.1 Dolby digital surround sound audio track and optional English SDH subtitles. A 26-minute, full screen making-of featurette amusingly misidentifies producer Don Murphy as Ron Murphy, and cedes far too much of its interview time with the actors to Scheffer, just based on his total screen time. Haas admits he drew upon the experience of terrifying his younger brothers for his role, but it’s Basinger’s comments which prove most interesting, when she seems to allude to her turbulent marriage with Alec Baldwin in talking about the “emotional bank” from which to draw in playing a woman both put and held down for so long.
There’s also a feature-length audio commentary with Scottish writer-director Montford and Transformers producer Murphy. It’s the latter — despite his amusing description of a Vietnamese character’s offshoot native-tongue utterance as a “Chinese chant” — who teases out most of the interesting anecdotal details of the production’s rainy Vancouver shoot. These tidbits include a massive rewrite to incorporate an empty housing development instead of the woodsy outdoors, and the fact that apparently Montford slightly irked both Basinger and her cinematographer at one point when she didn’t tell them about a squibbed side mirror during an escape sequence. Oh, and Montford and Murphy talk, too, about the word “cunt” and its use on opposite sides of the Atlantic, which is rather amusing. Also included are the film’s theatrical trailer and two TV spots. To view the trailer, click here; to purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here. D (Movie) B (Disc)
I’ve sat on this email for a bit, busy with other stuff, and he hardly needs my help with publicity, but Irish filmmaker Frank Kelly is putting together a documentary — entitled 140, naturally, after the number of permitted characters per update — about Twitter, and its sudden ascendancy as a binding social media tool/outlet. It will involve 140 filmmakers in 140 different locations around the world. The additional rub? They will shoot for 140 seconds simultaneously.
As Kelly explains: “The theme is connection. I’m asking the filmmaker what it is that connects them to their home. It can be anything they want — a landscape, cityscape, a sunrise, a wife, husband, child… it doesn’t matter. But it has to be captured in 140 seconds and at the same time as everyone else. I will designate a time and then give the call ‘Action’ on my cellphone. Everyone will receive the message at the same time and we will all start shooting together. A single moment of connection through film and the Internet, captured.”
This could be scattershot brilliant, or maybe not, but at the very least it has the potential to say something interesting about new intersections of life, community and technology; it crucially depends on some of the vetting/selection, though. Regardless, I look forward to checking back in on this. Filming is set to commence June 21. For more information, click here, or… well, just go to Twitter.
Built around Jean-Paul “Bluey” Maunick, a Mauritius-born singer and sound pioneer, British collective Incognito has built up a small but devoted following through its non-stop stream of new musical ideas and sophisticated, emotionally engaging variations on old stand-by rhythms. Consisting, in its current incarnation, of Maunick, keyboardist Matt Cooper, bassist Francis Hylton, drummer Richard Bailey, trombonist Trevor Mires, multi-instrumentalist Sid Gauld, saxophonist Paul Greenwood and an additional backing vocal crew of around five or six other members, Incognito folds together elements of fusion jazz, gospel and old-time soul.
Recorded live at the 2008 Java Jazz Festival in Jakarta (as the title might clue you into), this two-hour concert offering bills a mix of “poignant soul ballads, funky dynamic numbers and gospel ecstasy,” which it more than lives up to. While the embraced penchant for solos eventually comes across as a bit reductionist and formulaic in its own right, the interpretative skills of the musicians is such that one doesn’t hold much of a grudge, regardless of their previous familiarity with the group. The attractively shot DVD’s track listing is as follows: “I Can See the Future,” “Pieces of a Dream,” “Deep Waters,” “Without You,” “N.O.T.,” “Can’t Get You Out of My Head,” “Talkin’ Loud,” “When the Sun Comes Down,” “Morning Sun,” “Always There,” “Clav Interlude,” “Colibri,” “Reach Out,” “Nights Over Egypt,” “Don’t You Worry ‘Bout a Thing,” “Everyday,” “I Hear Your Name” and “Still a Friend of Mine.”
Presented on a region-free disc in 4:3 full screen, Incognito’s DVD comes with Dolby digital 5.1 and DTS stereo audio tracks, and is housed in a clear plastic Amaray case. DVD supplemental features consist solely of a bonus slideshow. To purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here. B- (Concert) C+ (Disc)
Alone except for her beloved dog Lucy, a retriever, and some vaguely defined
dreams of a new life, Indiana native Wendy Carroll (Michelle Williams)
is driving through the Pacific Northwest to Alaska, in hopes of a
summer of lucrative work at a fish cannery. When her car breaks down in
a sleepy, boarded-up Oregon mining town, however, the thin fabric of her already tenuous financial situation comes apart, and she confronts a series of increasingly dire economic decisions, with far-ranging repercussions for herself and Lucy.
Working from a short story written by her Old Joy collaborator Jon Raymond, director Kelly Reichardt uses a formal minimalist style to construct an emotionally impressionistic road movie that feels rudderless in ways mostly enthralling but also sometimes a bit frustrating. At its core, Wendy and Lucy is a carefully observed film about sympathy and generosity at the
dirty-fingernailed edges of American life. In some ways, it feels like an old folk song come to life. Watching it, one is reminded of the
refrain from U2’s “One” — “we get to carry each other” — about the
privilege of shared sacrifice. Wendy and Lucy also touches on the modern limits and depths of people’s duty to one another, though. If the film
sputters a bit in conveying much of substance about what Wendy actually thinks
about her predicament beyond the surface exasperation of someone never really dealt much of a winning hand, Williams herself is never less than hypnotizing.
And in the current recessional times, the film’s blank canvas and
broadly sketched melancholic tones serve as an empty vessel for those
who would watch a film and like to see, in the personal, a broader
political statement.
Housed in gate-fold cardboard packaging in turn stored in a reinforced cardboard slipcover made of 80 percent mixed-source recycled material, Wendy and Lucy‘s DVD release sets a new standard for eco-friendly attractiveness; the case feels both unimpeachably sturdy and environmentally conscious. Like Criterion, distributor Oscilloscope also numbers the spines of their titles, so this title rates an “OSC 4” stamped above its spine lettering. With simple design and a motion-animated menu screen, the film is presented in 1.78:1 anamorphic widescreen, preserving the aspect ratio of its theatrical exhibition, and it comes with a 5.1 Dolby digital surround sound audio track, as well as optional English subtitles.
The disc’s supplemental features exhibit Reichardt’s magnanimous nature, as she gives an assist to four of her Bard College colleagues by presenting a combined five of their experimental short films. Critic and curator Ed Halter’s introductory essay (he’s also a Department of Film and Electronic Arts professor at Bard) is reprinted on the cardboard packaging, or viewable on three scrollable screens. Two 16mm, black-and-white observational offerings from Peter Hutton, Boston Fire and New York Portrait, Chapter II, frame their stated moments of investigation with painterly composition. Peggy Ahwesh’s eight-minute The Scary Movie, starring children and featuring a discrete soundtrack, highlights the importance of effective sound design in evoking unease, and manages to come across as partially evocative of both David Lynch and Charlie Chaplin — no small feat. Based on the journals of Soviet neuropsychologist A.R. Luria, and the filmmaker’s own travels to Uzbekistan, Jacqueline Goss’ digitally animated How to Fix the World focuses on clashing cultures and how language shapes our shared experience. Les LeVeque’s lowercase-insistent flight, meanwhile, strobes and stutters iconic moon landing footage, reaching for an ironic, performance artist’s profundity that never quite materializes. Artfully partitioned trailers for other Oscilloscope releases are also included, which is very cool, but the total lack of interview footage or indeed any additional material with Reichhardt is indisputably a blow to the re-play value of this DVD. B (Movie) B- (Disc)
A handful of eerily staged scenes and a surfeit of passably evocative production design can’t save the otherwise muddled, new-to-DVD Passengers, in which recent Oscar nominee Anne Hathaway stars as a grief counselor assigned to help survivors of a fiery plane crash. In trying willfully to tick such a wide variety of genre boxes, though, the gauzy melodrama ends up servicing none that credibly.
Assigned by her boss (Andre Braugher) to
help walk a quintet of airplane crash survivors through their shock and
grief, psychologist Claire Summers (Hathaway) encounters particular
difficulties with one of them, Eric (Patrick Wilson). While others display
behavior more consistent with massive trauma, Eric is bouncy and charged by a newfound energy, but also secretive. He flirts with Claire and asks her out
on dates, which strikes her as odd. As her other clients begin
to disappear, though, Claire finds herself swimming in paranoia,
suspecting a strange airline employee (David Morse) of having a hand in their
disappearance, possibly to cover up the real reasons for the crash.
Narratively, Passengers marks a departure from the past films of Colombian-born director Rodrigo Garcia (Nine Lives), whose recent small screen work on HBO’s In Treatment showcased a level of psychological engagement not on display here. Passengers‘ mystery never takes hold, mainly because Ronnie Christensen’s script
is a thinly sketched mood-piece of appropriated motifs and
characterizations. Almost a decade on, the huge success of M. Night
Shyamalan’s The Sixth Sense is still spawning mystery-thrillers
that seem chiefly backwards-plotted, with gimmicky point-of-view pivots
that are meant to draw appreciative audience reactions out of a
re-framing of the narrative. Given the loose, unrealistically pitched nature of some of the characters in Passengers,
though, it’s quickly apparent that the movie isn’t a straight dramatic
telling, and only a small handful of scenarios seem plausible. Rodrigo,
accordingly, is left to try to imprint and impress a unifying visual
strategy on this forestalled revelation, with only fitful success.
Housed in a regular plastic Amaray case, Passengers comes presented in 2.40:1 anamorphic widescreen, with English and French language Dolby digital 5.1 audio tracks, and complementary English, French and Spanish subtitles to boot. Three deleted scenes run under eight minutes, while a 24-minute making-of featurette includes boilerplate interviews with cast and crew. More specific is a 16-minute featurette focusing on the special effects and stunt work used to capture the movie’s emotional centerpiece, its plane crash. The heftiest supplemental feature, though, is a feature-length audio commentary track with Garcia and Wilson; the pair ladle praise on the absent Hathaway, and generally strike a nice balance between production anecdotes and thematic discussion. To purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here. C- (Movie) B (Disc)
Blending gritty reality and poetic
expressionism, actor turned screenwriter and director Jules Dassin first gained recognition
for a series of tough-minded, urban action movies during film noir’s
glory years. This weekend, the Aero Theatre celebrates his work with three evenings of double features. The Naked City and Never on Sunday kick things off on Friday, May 15; Saturday, May 16 brings a heist flick double-fister, in the form of 1954’s Rififi and 1964’s Topkapi; Sunday, May 17, the tribute closes with screenings of 1950’s classic Night and the City and Thieves’ Highway.
The Aero Theatre
is located at 1328 Montana Avenue in Santa Monica. Tickets for this movie, as well as other special events, are available through Fandango, but for 24-hour recorded
information on directions and the Aero’s upcoming schedule,
phone (323) 466-FILM. For more information on Easy Virtues, which opens May 22 from Sony Pictures Classics, visit its British web site by clicking here.
It’s a happy birthday to Swedish-born Malin Akerman today, who turns 31 and probably celebrates by receiving some more Silk Spectre swag from jokester friends and representatives, and being mistaken for Sienna Miller by some hapless barista. It’s no coincidence that the brothers Farrelly cast Akerman in The Heartbreak Kid; she has some of the same spunky, manic charm that helped propel Cameron Diaz into the stratosphere after her winning turn in the smash hit There’s Something About Mary. Key word: some. But she was a part of Watchmen‘s problems, sad but true, and I don’t know that anyone of reasonable mind can picture her donning a wig and going homely, a la Diaz in Being John Malkovich, let alone dabbling substantively in drama.
I met Akerman, who actually has a music background, on the set of The Brothers Solomon, and the general impression I got was of a fairly sweet-natured gal who, in the memorable words of Mike Skinner, is fit but knows it, and is thus basically just along for the ride in the whole film world. If there exists a burning artistic ambition or fierce independent streak, it was hidden away that day. The star-stuffed ensemble comedy Couples Retreat is on deck for her later this, among other stuff in the works; it’d be interesting, though, if Akerman mixed in a small-town melancholic indie or two along the way over the next couple years, either in the lead or as the wise but somehow broken friend. Nothing too overtly melodramatic, just a tonal change-up. It could open new avenues for her, I think. Regardless, somewhere, Kal Penn and John Cho smile to themselves, and/or possibly exchange the email equivalent of a fist bump.
Filmmaker Kirby Dick caused quite a stir a few years back with This Film Is Not Yet Rated, his incendiary documentary about the secret inner workings, and often glaring double standards, of the Motion Picture Association of America’s ratings classification system. Now he’s back with Outrage, a name-dropping indictment of the hypocrisy of closeted homosexual politicians with appalling gay rights voting records, and the media’s complicity in blanching at reporting on the matter. I recently had the chance to chat with Dick by phone; the conversation is excerpted below:
Brent Simon: To your mind, why is the mainstream media squeamish about exploring potential disconnects between public and private personae?
Kirby Dick (below): Actually, I think they’re afraid to write about
issues that deal with gay sexuality. I think they’re concerned with
their readership — which [is presumably] mostly straight, with maybe
some fundamentalists — finding it offensive, or just uncomfortable. Now,
that’s kind of homophobia in my mind. I don’t think the individual
reporters are homophobic, but the policy breeds homophobia because as
Barney Frank has said, they’ll write everything about his personal
life, but they won’t write the fact that he’s gay. What is the message
that gets out? That there’s something wrong with being gay. That
message gets disseminated, and instills homophobia. And I think there’s
another reason. In terms of reporting on the
hypocrisy of specific politicians, these news outlets are reluctant to
do so because they’re often owned by major corporations that have a lot of
business, if you will, running through Congress. So these members of
Congress might be voting on legislation that has to do with things that
might very much effect these corporations’ bottom lines. And so they
just see no upside in telling the truth or doing this sort of
reporting, because they’re just going to anger these politicians.
BS: Is it perhaps also an issue that hypocrisy is just a relatively nuanced “sell” in a soundbite-driven media age?
KD: I think hypocrisy is often too tough of a sell, but that’s
no reason not to do it. I think you’re right; people would like to
gloss over the more complex issues, of which this is certainly one. In
some ways it’s uncomfortable to write about these things, but that’s
the job of the press.
BS: What was the genesis of the idea for this film — was it the 2004 election?
KD: Well, it was actually from August, 2006. I was in Washington, D.C. promoting This Film Is Not Yet Rated, which was a story I knew about primarily because I was in the film business. So in D.C. I said, OK, there’s probably a number of stories that people inside the Beltway know would make great subjects for a documentary, and I started talking with folks and very quickly learned about these closeted politicians, many of whom were voting anti-gay. And again, when I realized that this wasn’t being covered in the mainstream media, I thought it was the perfect opportunity.
BS: What were your feelings, then, about the 2004 presidential election, and specifically all these marriage-protection constitutional ballot measures, which didn’t seem to have a lot of feeling behind them, but instead seemed designed almost solely for political gain?
KD: In some ways it makes it worse. The fact is, here’s George W. Bush, who has gay friends and gay staff, who by all accounts of people we’ve talked to who’ve interacted with him personally is not homophobic, and yet he decides to pass an amendment that restricts the rights of millions of American citizens solely to maintain power and be elected again. That is one of the most cynical and crass uses of the legislative process ever.
BS: I expected its tough-minded investigative nature, which is considerable, but I was surprised a bit by the strength of Outage‘s emotional component, and in particular the powerfully articulated reflections of former New Jersey governor Jim McGreevey. How tough of an interview get was he, and did you know or suspect going in that he was going to have some of the heartrending insights that he did?
KD: You’re right, he was incredibly eloquent. It took some time to get him, but we were able to. This is what happens when someone comes out of the closet; they have a story to tell about the anguish of being in the closet, they have a story to tell about how great it is to be out of the closet, and I think they want that story shared not only with the public, but with politicians and young people going into politics. It’s kind of a cautionary tale — don’t make the same mistake I did, I’m much happier now, I wish I was out from the very beginning. So for both (former Arizona Congressman) Jim Kolbe and Jim McGreevey, it is a very personal and emotional story, even still, and you can tell in the way that they talk about it.
BS: There’s a lot of talk, given the beatdowns that they have suffered in the last two election cycles, about more inclusive language and even issue stances within the Republican party, but so far there doesn’t seem to be a gene for shamed silence, let alone much honest introspection. Do you think there will be an intra-party come-to-Jesus, for lack of a better phrase, with regards to the issue of gay marriage?
KD: I would hope so, and I think you’re seeing that debate. I don’t think it’s by any means definite. Reactionary elements in the political arena will always use this technique of demonizing the minority, particularly if there’s some sort of morality or health issue that they can pull into it. This will come up again, so I don’t think we should be surprised to see if in 20 or 30 years down the road there isn’t another attack on the rights of gays and lesbians. Right now things are trending positively, but let’s see what happens with the Supreme Court decision on the case in California. I’d heard that before Iowa legalized same-sex marriage, they were almost certainly going to vote to uphold Proposition 8, but now I think they’re looking at the situation and realizing how the trend is going, and realizing maybe that if they vote in support of Proposition 8, they may be the last major court in this country to support this kind of bigotry. Hopefully they’ll realize that it’s the right thing to do, and the wrong thing in terms of their legacy. But it’s a very important decision, and I really hope they make the right one.
BS: What do you make of, in the wake of [Supreme Court Justice David] Souter’s recently announced exit, the Republicans’ attack on the word empathetic… that it’s coded language that Obama is using to prick the ears of liberal foot soldiers and activists? What of the notion, as I believe Laura Ingraham opined, that empathy is a singularly ridiculous, loopy and disqualifying quality to aspire to have in a judge?
KD: Yeah, that’s absurd. I think Republicans are struggling, and still operating in the arena of counter-attack, in that I think they’ve been so trained, certainly since Newt Gingrich in 1994, their modus operandi is to just hit, and it’s hard for them to get out of that. I think they’re continuously looking for anything that they can mount a charge on, and somehow damage the president. They were very successful with the whole impeachment, and this is what the whole far right-wing of the Republican party has grown up with, this strategy of [destruction], and so I think that’s what you’re seeing, a knee-jerk reaction to strike even if there’s no logic to it.
BS: The film touches on something I found interesting — the so-called “nine families,” and The Heritage Foundation, which I was familiar with in name, but not inception. I hold no illusions that a lot of what is talked about in politics is insincere; you’re trying to vote-wrangle, looking for a wedge issue that you can push and exploit, so we pass through entire administrations where nothing happens on truly pressing matters like Social Security, fuel efficiency, energy or global warming. But was there more that you learned about the genesis of gay marriage as a political issue?
KD: Well, I think there was and are two strands of the Republican party over the last several decades, and one is a more fundamentalist and religious, and one is more economically-oriented. So these nine families were looking for a way to platform capitalism, particularly after the counter-culture movement of the 1960s. And for a long time, they didn’t see any benefit in aligning themselves with the fundamentalist movement, which they didn’t seem to share many interests with. But I think a calculation was made in the late 1980s and particularly early ’90s that the issue of gay marriage could be used to get Republicans elected who [would] then support this pro-capitalist agenda. That’s related to George Bush’s decision in many ways. The constituency and the power behind him really didn’t care about gay marriage. In fact there’s a lot of revelation that they viewed fundamentalists as kooks. But they saw that they could use them. Again, it’s incredibly cynical, because it’s one thing to make a political calculation, it’s another thing to demonize American citizens in order to do so.
BS: Given t
he many subjects, from Larry Craig (above) to Charlie Crist, what was the process of winnowing down Outrage like, and was Mike Rogers, the blogger at the heart of the movie, someone you latched onto at the beginning of production?
KD: Certainly, he was one of the major forces in the second or third wave of outing. What was happening in 2004, with this incredible build-up of anti-gay hysteria leading to the Federal Marriage Amendment, was that a lot of people, paricularly gays and lesbians, both Republicans and Democrats, were working to derail it behind the scenes. But because D.C. is such a closed town, people weren’t coming out and operating in the public arena, and that’s when Mike Rogers stepped out and said, “Look, there’s a lot of closeted gays and lesbians who are supporting this, and I’m going to expose this hypocrisy publicly.” And he tapped into a great deal of anger across the country, got these tips, particularly around Ed Shrock and Larry Craig. So certainly that was extremely important for us to show.
BS: I think I was most struck by some of the thoughts of Rich Tafel, the executive director of the Log Cabin Republicans, when he talked about friends and colleagues who embraced “the strength and stamina” required to stay in the closet. Was that something you encountered in your interviews — this willful pride at leading secret lives?
KD: In particular with closeted staffers; we just couldn’t get people to speak. We were actually very surprised, but we couldn’t. That statement by Rich Tafel is one of the most fascinating things in the film. When I first heard it it seemed absurd, but the more I thought about it, it made sense. These people have made the decision to put their political ambition ahead of anything in their personal life, and you what? It probably works.
BS: Kirby, thanks for your time. Wrapping up, is there anything else definitively on tap?
KD: No, I’m working on another closet, so to speak, but I can’t really talk about it yet because I don’t want them to know that I’m coming their direction.
Targeting one of the most important sectors among consumer groups, Sony Pictures Home Entertainment has partnered with Maxim to offer a free one-year subscription to the magazine with the purchase of any one of Sony’s newly re-branded “Action Unleashed!” DVDs. “We wanted to create a campaign to leverage some of our existing male-focused catalog,” explained Marc Rashba, Vice President of Worldwide Marketing for Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, in a press release. “The Action Unleashed! campaign is designed to create awareness, and through our partnership with Maxim we hope to connect to this very important audience.”
So what does this all mean? Errr… just re-packaged DVDs in new slipcovers with faux bullet holes, it seems. Which makes some sense for both Bad Boys flicks, say, but not so much for Rocky Balboa. The discs — including the aforementioned titles, xXx: State of the Union, Black Hawk Down and Ghost Rider, among other movies — hit major retail outlets, as well as drug and grocery stores, on May 12.
Technically, Adam Berg’s short film Carousel is “just” an ad for Philips’ flat-screen Cinema 21:9 TV. But in terms of technical achievement, it’s an eye-opener — a 139-second tracking shot of a sprawling heist shoot-out between cops and bad guys dressed as clowns, in which the characters never move, but the camera does. Somewhere, Martin Scorsese and Alfonso Cuaron jizz in their pants.
Lapsed Republican Andrew Sullivan takes a swing at the Coulter-O’Reilly-Limbaugh-Hannity flu-strain of conservatism, and ticks off why the GOP is poison to him. Namely, it’s “their abandonment of limited government, their absurd spending under Bush, their contempt for civil liberties, their rigid mindset, their hostility to others, their worship of the executive branch, their contempt for judicial checks, their cluelessness with racial minorities and immigrants, their endorsement of torture as an American value, their homophobia, their know-nothing Christianism, and the sheer vileness of their leaders.” Sullivan also wonders when someone will “Sister Souljah them,” but then (correctly) arrives at the truth: whom Republicans hate is their core motivation right now.
I recently put a bullet in a long-lingering copy of Sidney Lumet’s Power, from 1986. It’s a not-at-all-bad political-power-broker drama, starring a mustachioed Richard Gere as Pete St. John, a hired-gun, high-billing, ultra-successful political image consultant who’s wrapping up a populist national campaign in South America while also overseeing simultaneous gubernatorial races in New Mexico and Washington, plus a special Ohio senate election to fill the seat of one of his first clients, and perhaps closest friend.
The film’s plot turns mostly on the latter strand, and a potential blackmail/political reorganization scheme that may be afoot in an effort to squash — get this — a comprehensive renewable energies program. Yes, in 1986. Some other forward-reaching, ahead-of-the-curve and/or timeless bits — including eerily appropriate invocations of “straight talk” and not being “able to afford on-the-job-training” — help make the movie look hip, politically knowing and with it, if the fashions certainly don’t. It’s desperately out of step, however, with regards to the mercenary ethic with which it imbues St. John. Money may have ruled in the mid-1980s, but partisans on both sides have since hardened; while party switcheroos are not unusual, either early or late in political life (see James A. Baker, and most recently Arlen Specter), top-shelf campaign gunners could now certainly not move so freely along the ideological spectrum as Gere’s character. They wouldn’t be trusted — kind of like a guy who neither drinks nor knows a single thing about any sport. Information would be withheld, jaws clenched, etcetera; destruction would commence from the inside out, on one brittle campaign or another.
Mostly, though, I was struck by an amusing depiction of technology in Power. There’s a 103-second computer search sequence (think about that) where a number-crunching ally of St. John tries to unearth the business connections, off-shore and otherwise, of a shadowy lobbyist (played by Denzel Washington) who’s hired St. John to oversee the campaign of a well-financed Ohio Democrat. It’s a looong scene, sure, so it’s funny in that regard. But it’s also notable because the character even leaves the room, assuming, I guess, that it will take his supercomputer all night to complete the task. Watching this, you can’t convince me that Google and other search engines, for all their advantages, aren’t going to (even further) massively effect the gratification impulses of today’s kids. This partially relates, I believe, to the Bush administration’s (political) success in playing so fast and loose with facts about the Iraq War, torture, et al. Why? Because information seemingly means less when, over and over, it’s gained without consistent, focused mental effort.
On the verge of losing his job, rundown New Yorker jingle writer Harvey
Shine (Dustin Hoffman) flies to London for a weekend to attend his
daughter’s wedding, but promises to be back on Monday morning to make
an important meeting. He arrives to learn his daughter has chosen her
stepfather to walk her down the aisle instead of him. Devastated,
Harvey leaves the wedding before the reception, misses his plane and
ends up drowning his sorrows at the airport bar, where he
strikes up a conversation with Kate Walker (Emma Thompson), a slightly
prickly, 40-something singleton whose life is limited to work, the
occasional humiliating blind date and endless phone calls from her
smothering, quasi-delusional mother, Maggie (Eileen Atkins). The growing
connection between the pair energizes and inspires both of them, even
as they grapple with difficulties of adult-onset romance.
Not yet 40, British-born writer-director Joel Hopkins (Jump Tomorrow) perhaps doesn’t have the necessary life experience to pull off the
injection of a credible depth of feeling into this sort of autumnal tale, and so the presence of a pair of two-time Academy Award winners is more or less fumbled away, in shrugging fashion. The resultant
harmless inconsequentiality is a lumpy, sentimental mass that clumsily strikes many of the familiar surface keys of melancholic regret.
But there’s a crinkle-eyed mischievousness that pokes through in
Hoffman’s performance, and that robs the character — and thus the movie as a
whole — of a chance at developing into something darker, and more arresting. (As
Harvey’s grown but still wounded and emotionally distant daughter
Susan, it’s Liane Balaban who makes a lasting impression.)
Hopkins
doesn’t necessarily want to play on that field, with real adult pain and regret, but he should, honestly, since
his film doesn’t have the wit to compete with Something’s Gotta Give,
the movie that it most clearly wants to emulate. Ergo, when the goofy
musical montage of Kate trying on dresses inevitably arrives, you don’t forgive
it and just go with the flow of the movie, you don’t give it another chance. No, instead, you turn on Last Chance Harvey, and
actually start to hold a grudge.
Housed in a regular Amaray case with an accompanying cardboard slipcover, Last Chance Harvey comes presented in 2.35:1 anamorphic widescreen, with a lively English language Dolby digital 5.1 surround sound audio track, and complementary English and Spanish subtitles. Supplemental features are anchored by a winning audio commentary track with Hopkins and his two respected stars; Hoffman’s thoughts are separately recorded, but generally well integrated, and overall the feature-length chat oscillates nicely between anecdotal remembrances, thematic analysis and other observations. A 17-minute making-of featurette mixes film clips, on-set footage and sit-down interview chats with the film’s actors; rounding out matters is the movie’s theatrical trailer. To purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here. C- (Movie) B (Disc)
In celebration of the huge cheddar that Obsessed banked this past weekend, and in the spirit of some of its past great examinations of cultural-quirk sub-genres, the recently relaunched Movieline takes a look at nine “crazy white bitch” movies, and correctly notes the necessary emotionally satisfying inclusion of “one decent wife-on-murderous-slut catfight in its third act.” The included clips are nice, but the piece needs a bit more snark. And what about The Temp? And Disclosure? Big omissions, really…
Large fan boy Harry Knowles has seemingly walked back his “official recommendation” of skipping Wolverine, saying he’ll check it out in theaters today, opening day. His initial shrugging protest seemed mainly inspired by the fact that “Fox refused to invite one [sic] the AICN editors to an advance screening,” which was probably inspired by posts like this one, which called 20th Century Fox out on the fact that they were lying about differences between the leaked, air-quote work print online and the final version of the film opening in theaters today. Huge multi-national corporations tend not to like being called out on their shit.
So… Knowles’ reaction: Petty? Sure. But it’s actually more or less in line with my own feelings, in some ways. He just plays the slightly douchey slight-me-and-I’ll-slight-you-back card. I was a huge fan of the first two X-Men films, understandably a bit baffled by the third flick, but still a big fan of Hugh Jackman. So I should care about Wolverine. At least a little bit. But now? After being waylaid in efforts to line up a screening earlier in the week, (which, hey, they at least actually took the proactive step of inviting critics to), I just don’t care. There’s no anger or pique, though, really, except when I have a pressing assignment; this just more or less dovetails with the swell in a shrugging, above-the-fray attitude with which I’ve been infected over the hassle of so many studio screenings. I won’t say that I’ve grown cynical about films themselves; I haven’t. But the number of movies which elicit true anticipation seem to shrink every year. There’s plenty of stuff in which I have legitimate interest, but if all the variables don’t align, or I only get a same-day invite or some such bullshit, nevermind… I’m on to the next thing. Money attaches itself to other opportunities, and there are always other things to see and write about. I don’t feel the slightest bit empty inside missing a lot of these Hollywood movies.
In advance of its Stateside theatrical bow, the Aero Theatre will host a special advance screening of Easy Virtue, a romantic comedy starring Jessica Biel and Ben Barnes — on Saturday, May 9 at 7:30 p.m., as part of a double feature of director Stephan Elliott’s work. An adaptation of Noel Coward’s play, Easy Virtue centers around John Whittaker, a young Englishman who falls madly in love with Larita, a sexy and glamorous American woman. They marry impetuously, but when the couple returns to the stuffy Whittaker family home, John’s mother (Kristin Scott Thomas) has an instant allergic reaction to her new daughter-in-law. Sparks fly, and a battle of wits ensues. Australian Elliott (Eye of the Beholder) will appear in person for a discussion between Easy Virtue and a 9:30 screening of his 1994 film The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert.
The Aero Theatre
is located at 1328 Montana Avenue in Santa Monica. Tickets for this movie, as well as other special events, are available through Fandango, but for 24-hour recorded
information on directions and the Aero’s upcoming schedule,
phone (323) 466-FILM. For more information on Easy Virtues, which opens May 22 from Sony Pictures Classics, visit its British web site by clicking here.
