Simon Baker and Paz Vega headline Not Forgotten, a meandering, Tex-Mex, give-me-back-my-daughter air-quote thriller that plays like a wayward cousin of Angel Heart, some juju potboiler and a lost, half-sketched Zalman King flick. Fans of Baker will perhaps spark to his crusading, paternally protective ways, but general audiences will lose interest long before the movie’s forced twist ending.
Not Forgotten unfolds in Del Rio, a small, peaceful Texas border town. Jack Bishop (The Mentalist‘s Baker) is a picture-perfect husband to new wife Amaya (Vega), and a doting father to his 11-year-old daughter Toby (Chlore Moretz). But when she’s kidnapped, Jack dives headlong into a Mexican hell of barrios and bordellos controlled by the mysterious La Santa Muerte, a sort of religious criminal sect. Working with a newly appointed sheriff and a pair of wary federal agents, Jack vows to track down her abductors no matter the cost; when initial suspect Calvo Huerta (Zahn McClarnon) proves little more than a patsy, however, Jack finds disturbing answers tied up in his complicated past. Borat‘s Ken Davitian, Michael DeLorenzo, Claire Forlani and Benito Martinez all co-star.
An enchanting actress who, given the opportunity, can play alluring and dangerous without merely clanging the one-note keys of “the exotic other,” Vega (Sex and Lucia, Spanglish) here isn’t given much with which to work, though she does kindly reveal her ass, which is a thing of special beauty. She, in her small role, and Baker, in the lead, offer up committed performances, but the characters are more or less ciphers, and their personalities change to suit the necessary actions of any given scene. It doesn’t much help that Not Forgotten will not let audiences forget that they are watching a capital-M movie, by gosh, so pointlessly full of stylized flashbacks is it. The sum effect of its familiar disparate parts — some jittery camerawork here, an Eyes Wide Shut-type masked sequence there, and a pinch of Mexican strip club salaciousness to boot — bores rather than intrigues. By the time an old lady starts spinning a yarn about “the cranes of the lost city of Aztlan,” one wants to pat her on her filthy head and book a flight back to the American ‘burbs, far away from this affectedly grimy, bizarre and alien setting.
Housed in a regular plastic Amaray case in turn stored in a cardboard slipcover, Not Forgotten comes to DVD presented in 2:35:1 widescreen, preserving the aspect ratio of the movie’s limited theatrical exhibition. Audio is presented in the form of a Dolby digital 5.1 surround sound track, which nicely complements the dialogue with moody background ambiance when the situations call for it. A feature-length audio commentary track with co-writer/producer/director Dror Soref and co-writer/associate producer
Tomas Romero is the best of an otherwise spare slate of supplemental extras; the pair yawningly compliment themselves on a few lines, but also talk about the challenges of shooting on location (noise you can’t always control being the biggest hurdle), and point out stage-shot insertions and green-screen composites that one otherwise wouldn’t guess or recognize. A six-minute behind-the-scenes featurette includes some on-set footage, but no interview chats with the cast, unfortunately — only more material with Soref and Romero. The theatrical trailer is also included. To purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here. C- (Movie) C+ (Disc)
I recently penned a full-length review for a cinema annual compendium of Valentino: The Last Emperor, a negative assessment that I won’t reproduce or fully get into here, but I feel again compelled to stress what a disappointment and bore this movie was, on any and every level. This is the laziest sort of documentary filmmaking there is — pick an engaging subject that exists or operates in rarefied air, get granted “backstage” status, and then just kind of see what one can randomly capture, tossing in sit-down interview footage but never substantively following up on any issues raised.
Despite garnering mostly correspondingly positive reviews and beating fellow fashion documentary The September Issue out of the gate by opening first, this March, Valentino: The Last Emperor, a look at iconic designer Valentino Garavani as he prepares to celebrate the 45th anniversary of haute couture, grossed only $1.7 million in theaters, or about half of what the former film pulled in. The chief reason may well be that while The September Issue spent some of its time tracking a relatable workplace rivalry that felt enriched and heightened in stakes by its tony surroundings, first-time filmmaker Matt Tyrnauer scarcely discovers anything of note about any of the relationships that form the crux of his movie, personally or professionally.
In fact, the director is so clearly infatuated with his subject that even when he does capture something approaching a moment infused with drama or intrigue — at one point Garavani has a tiff and insists that he stop being filmed, in another instance his business partner of several decades, Giancarlo Giammetti, asserts that his corporate boss’ opinions “have no value” with respect to the actual direction of the company — Tyrnauer does not follow up on it. The general operating philosophy seems to be to simply point the camera to and fro, and see what it incidentally captures. This lack of intellectual rigor extends from everything from Garavani’s personal life (he and Giammetti were apparently lovers for a dozen years, but the movie never even makes mention of this, let alone inquires as to how the dissolution of a romantic relationship might have impacted their business together) to unexplored, potentially interesting theses about the designer’s professional development, since he confesses to being influenced mightily by the style of screen stars he glimpsed in films and magazines while growing up. Even a 2007 takeover of Valentino Fashion Group by British private equity firm Permira rates only cursory explanations via TV footage, information that scratches no deeper than a thumbnail. Owing to all this staggering incuriosity, there is no greater nut of meaning cracked within the movie, no matter all the rich style on display.
Presumably housed in a regular plastic Amaray case, the movie comes to DVD presented in 16×9 widescreen aspect ratio, with a Dolby digital 5.1 surround sound audio mix, and optional English, French, Spanish and Italian subtitles. Supplemental bonus material consists of three featurettes. Running 30 minutes, the first takes the viewer inside Garavini’s homes around the world, revealing the unique lifestyle he’s created for himself and the amount of work it takes to maintain it. We follow Michael Kelly, the designer’s Irish majordomo, as he prepares a lavish party at the Chateau Wideville estate, outside of Paris. In the eight-minute “The Last Collection,” we see footage from Garavini’s farewell haute couture show from January 2008. Finally, there’s eight additional minutes of footage from the designer’s Rome workshop, where seamstresses work on the red dress featured in the movie, and head seamstress Antonietta De Angelis reveals some of her secrets about dressmaking and working for the legendary, Italian-born designer. To purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here. D+ (Movie) B (Disc)
Almost a decade after gracing the pages of USA Today with his unlikely success story, filmmaker Troy Duffy is back in the news with Boondock Saints II: All Saints Day, the sequel to 1999’s stillborn cult flick about two avenging-angel Irish-Catholic brothers who cut a swath of revenge through Boston’s criminal underworld. At a Beverly Hills hotel, the writer-director recently talked about the strange, winding path to the screen of his first film in nearly 10 years, what he makes of his movie’s fan base and, yes, what he thinks about Overnight, the documentary that nearly derailed his career. The conversation is excerpted below:
Question: When did you first see this online fan base spring up around Boondock Saints?
Troy Duffy: I started to see it soon after it experienced its Blockbuster release. I don’t know if you know this, but we were sort of blacklisted from U.S. theaters because of the Columbine incident, and Blockbuster gave us a real, big, uncommon release — they gave us 60 to 100 copies in all their stores because they felt it was a much bigger movie. It turns out they were right. I almost immediately saw that fan base start to formulate as soon as it touched the public.
TD: These situations with political fallout don’t have anything to do with moviemaking. It’s just a fucking movie. You’re supposed to go there and have a good time. That’s why they call it the entertainment business. I don’t feel… if anything happens that shifts the political tectonic plates, that’s got nothing to do with us. You don’t want to see any copycat shit happen, but at the same time if some retard is going to go do that they’re going to come up with an excuse and blame something else anyway. We’ve seen it 100 times, and nine times out of 10 they’re just making the shit up to justify their actions and blame it on something else so that they can cut down on their prison time. I don’t concern myself with what real people do; this is a movie with actors, nobody died during the filming of this. It’s a piece of entertainment for people to enjoy, and if they happen to ask themselves a few questions and ponder a couple issues, like vigilantism and capital punishment, great. But that wasn’t my intention.
Question: How difficult was it to so much of the cast back for the movie?
TD: I’ve had that question a million times… and [people] never left, nobody went anywhere. These guys were calling me up every month or two, and I was keeping them in the loop on things. Once it got out that we had a deal, [even] crew members started hitting up my producer with messages, saying they wanted back in on it. One guy walked from a film he was doing, just said, “Hire somebody else, I’m going to do Boondock II.” That kind of loyalty? You can’t buy that, and those kinds of technicians put their full effort into the film. Nine times out of 10 you get, “Well, you don’t have the budget for that,” from stunts, special effects, make-up, the wardrobe department, you name it. What I got was, “What do you need?” Everybody just brought their A-games and realized this was a special one, this was something that they cared about it. And I believe that that transmits through the celluloid. For instance, I watched Frozen River recently, and I wanted to slit my wrists afterward, [it’s] not my particular cup of tea, but it’s obviously a film that somebody cared very deeply about, and a brilliant film and portrayal. That’s what we had to a man on this project, from filming all the way through post-production. Everybody that touched Boondock Saints looked at it like a little piece of gold that we were all hoping to mold into a vase.
Question: How acutely was the idea for the original film forged by real-life experiences?
TD: We lived in a hell-hole, me and my brothers — it’s not the most unique story. We saw crimes all the time, and we were victims of crime sometimes, and you realize that you don’t have any recourse. Your car gets vandalized, your apartment gets broken into, and the cops come and say, “Oh, here’s your report.” So we realized that Joe Average doesn’t really have much recourse when they’re the victims of crime. I believe everyone has the same reaction… when you see something truly disgusted on the news, that instant reaction is that whoever did that should die. We may not all say that, in fact probably 95 percent of us don’t. But we all have that thought, I believe that. So this was a way to play with that fantasy, and give a little bit of escape. And maybe the next time that somebody gets a crime committed against them, they can take it with a grain of salt, and realize that it will probably never get solved.
Question: This sequel makes some pretty bold narrative choices, and yet it isn’t some discrete scenario which just plops the brothers down into another revenge scenario.
TD: That came from story. The Boondock fans have deemed the first one sacred ground; the kind of fandom we’re lucky enough to have is over the moon. They’ve frame-fucked this movie into the ground, and they know everything about it. Writing I sequel, I couldn’t just rest on the laurels of the first movie, and do some polished-up version of the first one. I wanted to give them a whole new story, and there was a lot of curveballs and new aspects. We pushed the humor farther, there’s a higher body count, there’s more gunfights, we went into period piece flashbacks to 1950 to explain Il Duce’s history. Boondock fans are not used to this sort of thing. We have a Mexican in there, and a female lead. That hit the fan base like cold water in the face when they heard that one. Now they can’t live without her — the three screenings I’ve seen with about 1,300 kids. It’s a way to give them everything they love about the first film, and yet throw a brand new plot and storyline at them they never could have predicted — show them the new thing that we’re going to make cool.
Question: What about the documentary Overnight, which chronicled the flameout of your original Boondock Saints deal with Miramax? Was there an axe to grind there?
TD: There was an axe to grind. At the beginning of all this, when I was a bartender who wrote my first script and lo and behold it sold and there was a bidding war and all this press on it, two of my friends asked me and the rest of the guys if they could do a documentary, and we trusted them because they were our friends. So we granted them the permission they requested and let them shoot to their heart’s content what were the three most tumultuous years of my life. They edited that down to a complete smear job — very biased, very one-sided, and I think that everyone down to not just the entire cast but also crew members from the first film coming back and doing this one again speaks much louder than that.
Question:All Saints Day takes care to set up the possibility of another chapter — are there definitive plans for a third film?
TD: There’s some ideas percolating. But I’d like to get a couple things off my chest before that. During the last 10 years I’ve written five scripts, so I’d like to knock the other four down like dominoes. They’re very different stories than Boondock, but there’s definitely a possibility for a third. …Every time I talk to fans and ask them what they like about the first film, they give me a different set of answers. Some people like the brothers’ relationship, some people had a friend like Rocco in high school, some people like the religious slant — the Old Testament shit, back when God had balls. Some people like that it’s about a bunch of lucky Irish guys that seem to get out of things by the hair of their teeth. Take from it what you will, I say. This is your cheeseburger, eat it.
Question: What about the sociocultural specificity of the film — is that a big part of the appeal, in your opinion?
TD: [in affectedly deferential tone] The sociocultural specificity! I think we have a new 50-cent word, people. I don’t know quite exactly what that means.
Question: The Boston setting, the Irish brothers, the tenets of Catholicism…
TD: To me, I do things a lot of times, in the actual intricate makings of the film, I try to do everything I can to have the audience experience that emotion one level deeper. For instance, if there wasn’t any religious imagery in the movie, it wouldn’t be the same, would it? It would be just two badasses with guns. The device of religion helped bring us one level closer… whether we like it or not, the story of the Bible is ingrained in all of us, we know it. And that kind of tangibility helps bring us that one level deeper — closer to the emotions that I’m trying to get across. Same thing with music. Take a tender scene and take the music out of it and watch how less tender it is. I can only speak from my game, having done two films, but this is how I do it. There’s a lot of things I do to bring the audience closer to the characters. Using socioeconomic references, dancing around people’s sensitivities — and sometimes completely disrespecting these sensitivities — like it or not, these things elicit emotion, and if I’ve done my job right hopefully it’s the one I’m going for.
Question: What if anything does it say about the current state of the film industry, the idea that you’ve had an opportunity to return to the big screen with another installment of this story, despite all the original impediments to its making and theatrical release?
TD: I think it’s vindication. It’s no longer a matter of opinion anymore; if The Boondock Saints had been released in theaters, it would’ve been a gigantic fucking hit. The film has virtually become a financial juggernaut in the last 10 years, it’s grown and grown and grown, DVD sales are up every single year, from the time it came out until now. We didn’t get a shot back then to succeed on the level that a lot of other different films get. Being barred from theaters like that was a really big blow to us, and we worked really hard on this thing. This time we’re getting a honest chance, and I know that there are a lot of Boondock fans out there that have no idea about either film. I can tell sometimes when a guy hasn’t seen the movie, but he’d be into it. So I think that what I’m most excited about is seeing what this can really do. It’s like going to your kid’s first little league game — you hope he has a big bat and a big glove. We’ll see, maybe the kid’s a star. You never know.
The trailer for Salt, a Fugitive-esque espionage thriller re-teaming The Bone Collector director Phillip Noyce and Angelina Jolie, is online, in advance of being pegged in theaters to the forthcoming 2012, and it more or less whets one’s appetite for summery popcorn thrills. The slow-peddled opening coda nicely establishes its hook, the action is well cut together, and Jolie can obviously do smoldering intrigue, ass-kicking, and on-the-lam wheeling and dealing in her sleep. Nice use of a breathy lingerie interstitial, too. Does that sort of thing still matter to teenagers not yet getting any, though, what with the ascendancy and saturation of online porn these days? I guess it’s more or less ingrained in the blood of a certain generation of action trailer editors. But I have to say I’ve never really understood the whole jumping-off-a-wall-to-punch-someone-in-the-face thing, absent martial arts fantasia. Is it about leverage, or what? Clearly I need to take part in more brawls in narrow alleyways. Salt opens July 23, 2010, from Sony Pictures.
The notion of a direct-to-video flick costarring Mena Suvari as a money-hungry, social-climbing stripper might sound like cause for the eager rubbing together of palms by many a shoe-gazing twentysomething who came of age (in perhaps more ways than one) with American Beauty, but Lifetime tele-drama Sex & Lies in Sin City generally fails to ignite or engage either dirty or more casually inquisitive minds. A murder mystery based on a true story, the film contains all the requisite, tabloid-ready staples of such dramas — adultery, theft, familial in-fighting and the like — but it’s so haphazardly assembled and poorly acted as to totally drain it of any lascivious punch.
Reckless, drug-addled casino executive Ted Binion (Matthew Modine, seemingly impersonating Yosemite Sam or some other cartoon character) is a businessman who perpetually lives on the edge, but in Las Vegas that hardly makes him remarkable. High school dropout and beauty queen turned stripper Sandy Murphy (Suvari) wins his heart by initially refusing his drunken solicitations, and soon Sandy’s moved in with him, which only further enrages Ted’s estranged sister, Becky (Marcia Gay Harden). When Ted turns up dead, the victim of an apparent overdose, Becky doesn’t believe the diagnosis (“Overdose my fat Aunt Fanny,” are her exact words, I believe), and pushes for a police investigation. Hanging around at the fringes of the story, meanwhile, is Rick Tabish (Johnathon Schaech), a contractor who’s helping Ted build a safe for his precious stash of gold coins and other valuables — and an ex-con who also happens to be Sandy’s former (and perhaps still current) boyfriend. When Rick gets pinched for Ted’s murder, it pulls both Sandy and Becky into a media maelstrom involving not one but two media-circus trials.
Originally broadcast on Lifetime in October 2008, Sex & Lies in Sin City is adapted by Teena Booth from Jeff German’s book Murder in Sin City, though the title change is somewhat amusing, as there’s certainly no prurient additions to the material; to the contrary, if anything the movie feels like too timid a rendering of a seedy Southwestern story. Booth and director Peter Medak, perhaps owing to the source material, invest far too heavily in the legal maneuvering and the third-act skulking about of a reporter, Evan James (Arron Shiver), to the detriment of any real psychological insights to the characters of Sandy and Rick. Copious affected, black-and-white flashbacks substitute for meaningful drama; the performances, meanwhile, range from over-the-top (Modine) and shrewish (Harden) to more subdued and naturalistic (Schaech), which creates a tonal disharmony that can never be resolved.
Housed in a regular plastic Amaray case, Sex & Lies in Sin City comes presented in a completely adequate 1.78:1 anamorphic widescreen transfer, with an English language 5.1 Dolby digital audio track and optional English and Spanish subtitles. There are, alas, no supplemental features. To purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here. D (Movie) D (Disc)
Of all the new projects mentioned in this look at American Film Market announcement slate from Screen International — including Sofia Coppola’s Somewhere, starring Stephen Dorff, and the next film from Gavin O’Connor, who kind of got screwed on the release of Pride and Glory — I think I’m most intrigued by news that Nicole Holofcener (Walking and Talking, Friends with Money) will direct an untitled James McAvoy/Seth Rogen comedy about a sick man who must overcome a series of challenges on the road to recovery. She’s a wildly underrated director, and that’s an intriguing pairing that already has me leaning forward in my seat, future date to be determined.
Over at the Huffington Post, Bill Maher wonders just how much of a fan of Deep Cover President Obama is. Meanwhile, Roger Avary tweets from jail, while serving a one-year sentence for vehicular manslaughter. One is funny for its dark truths, the other just kind of sad.
