The new, revamped web site for Criterion is up and running, with a special orientation video from Jason Polan. One of the more notable innovations involves its online viewing component, which allows for $5, one-week viewing on certain titles, including Lord of the Flies, Sweetie, Fat Girl, Au Revoir Les Enfants, Il Posto and Solaris. It’s not money wasted, either; if viewers like what they see, they then get $5 off a DVD purchase of the same title. For more information on the online offerings, click here.
All posts by Brent
In Regards to Steve Carell’s Beaver
He’s only attached to star, and the search for a director isn’t yet complete, but somewhere on the horizon for Steve Carell might be The Beaver, a screwy treat written by 32-year-old Austinite and USC Film School grad Kyle Killen. I like what I hear from Vulture’s Dan Kois, who describes it as “Little Miss Sunshine meets Stranger Than Fiction.” The write-up makes me lean forward in appreciative anticipation even though I have problems with the former component of that mash-up. Carell doing something darker, or tinged with melancholy, is interesting, and almost certainly a good idea.
Jason Statham Talks About Shirtless Fighting, Transporter 3
Steven Seagal continues to find work in straight-to-video productions wherein bad guys standing near him fling themselves through plate-glass windows, while fellow late ’80s/early ’90s throat-puncher Jean-Claude Van Damme looks to reinvent himself in the recently released JCVD. It’s Jason Statham, though, who has inherited their go-to status as the gruffly charismatic star of various gritty, hand-to-hand-combat action flicks, cracking skulls in movies like Crank (and its impending sequel), Chaos, War and Death Race. His latest film is Transporter 3, in which he reprises his role as Frank Martin, a high-end, black-market courier who gets mixed up in various no-good situations. Sharply dressed in just the sort of fancy-man duds that inspire thoughts of an action scene breaking out at a moment’s notice, Statham spoke with me recently about ax attacks, his unlikely path to acting and the enigma that is that announced sequel to The Italian Job. For the full read, from New York Magazine‘s Vulture, click here.
Termination Point
Starring erstwhile Beverly Hills, 90210-er Jason Priestley and La Bamba‘s Lou Diamond Phillips, Termination Point follows an inventor of a teleportation device who has disappeared with this classified time-travel technology, and must be found before repercussions from potential time shifts threaten to destroy the Earth. Playing like a cross between Stephen King’s short story “The Langoliers” and some anonymous actioner from Wesley Snipes, circa 1999, that never quite got made, this cut-rate cable programmer will provide diversionary intrigue for huge fans of the Sci-Fi Channel, but few others.
Special Agent Caleb Smith (Priestley) is a man on a mission. When the mysterious, covert Alpha Stream Project is compromised and military time-travel technology is stolen by rogue scientist Dr. Daniel
Winter (Phillips), Agent Smith leads an all-out government
manhunt to get it back. Winter is determined not to let this
all-powerful weapon fall back into the hands of the military, however. When
Agent Smith finally tracks down his target, he must risk everything — including his wife Claire (Stefanie von Pfetten) and young daughter, who were on a commercial aircraft that entered a wormhole — in order to stop the weapon from being unleashed
on the world. Planes vanish, time distorts, Priestley glowers, and the very existence of
mankind hangs in the balance.
Written by Peter Sullivan and directed by the intriguingly named Jason Borque, Termination Point is relatively bad in ways perhaps expected (the special effects, to quote Butt-Head, aren’t very special), but also, more than that, just kind of sigh-inducing and disappointing. Phillips chiefly acts with his goatee, and Priestley (pretty good in 1997’s Love and Death on Long Island, let’s not forget) stoops to overly demonstrative television acting-type cues. Dutifully balancing “thrills” and shoot-’em-down chest-thumping to match a buzzed score, Sullivan and Borque never tap into their conceit’s conspiratorial element in a truly interesting manner.
Housed on DVD in a regular plastic Amray case, Termination Point is presented in 1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen, and features an exclusive, 16-minute behind-the-scenes featurette that includes interviews with all the principal on-screen players, as well as director Borque. These congratulatory EPK-style chats are all shot on location, which makes for a slightly amusing interruption when nearby cows start mooing wildly and disrupting the audio. Priestley and Phillips discuss how they first met (playing poker, over 15 years ago, for those scoring at home), and all invovled chat up Borque as an effective, quick lenser. Previews for six additional Sony titles — The Lazarus Project, The Water Horse: Legend of the Deep, Denis Leary’s Rescue Me, Hancock, Kabluey and My Mom’s New Boyfriend — are also included, rounding out the spare supplemental extras. To purchase Termination Point on DVD via Amazon, click here. C- (Movie) C (Disc)
Bolt
John Travolta lends his voice to the animated family film Bolt as the namesake star, a dog who goes on a wild cross-country journey to reunite with his young owner. Sharply drawn supporting characters, a solid narrative hook and slickly constructed action-adventure sequences help make for a vibrant, engaging, feel-good treat that will connect strongly with especially younger viewers.
For super-dog Bolt, every day is filled with adventure, danger and intrigue. The canine best friend of young Penny (voiced by Miley Cyrus), Bolt is the unwitting star of a hit TV show built around a variety of Hollywood-created powers, like heat vision, improbably long leaps and a “super bark” that can overturn cars. When he’s accidentally shipped from his soundstage home all the way to New York, Bolt sets off on a cross-country journey back to Penny.
At first convinced that all his amazing abilities have just been weakened by styrofoam packing peanuts, Bolt eventually learns the truth about the phony, Truman Show-like construction of his sheltered world. Still, Bolt pines for the only person he’s felt loved by and really known his entire life, so with the help of two unlikely traveling companions — a jaded, abandoned housecat named Mittens (voiced by Susie Essman) and a TV-obsessed hamster named Rhino (voiced by Mark Walton) — he heads west, finally discovering he doesn’t need superpowers to be a hero.
Owing to its show-within-a-show conceit, Bolt has ample opportunity for amped-up action, and co-directors Chris Williams and Byron Howard stage some madly kinetic scenes, including a wild, brawny opening sequence that pays homage to a few bits from The Matrix series. The core of the movie, however, lies in the bewildered interactions of its contrasting personalities, and Mittens, Rhino and several different groups of pigeons they encounter along the way all serve as amusing foils for Bolt.
The film looks quite appealing. In design, there’s a soft, painterly style to many of the film’s backgrounds, more than a bit evocative of hand-drawn animation of years gone by. The interplay between characters, shadow and foregrounded objects is uniformly fantastic, and subtly different lighting schemes are evidenced in various parts of the country during Bolt’s travels, including Ohio, Las Vegas and Los Angeles.
It’s a sign of the overall, deftly sketched success of Bolt’s action sequences and big emotional moments that one is free to nitpick about a few inconsistent character bits, as when Mittens teaches Bolt the joys of simple “dog stuff,” like sticking his head out of a moving car window, or playing fetch. These are all things that Bolt would still be familiar with; they seem only designed to pad out a montage. It’s also somewhat curious just how little substantive emotional investment there is in Bolt’s eventual recognition of his lack of powers. It’s about an inch thick, as if Bolt‘s makers didn’t think the film could handle the momentary drag. None of this will matter much to younger audiences, though.
Travolta’s vocal performance dutifully hits the emotional beats required in each scene, but — whether because of some of the aforementioned incongruities or just wandering focus — seems to lack a strong, codifying personality apart from Bolt’s quest. It’s a case of movie star casting slightly overshadowing animated character. There’s no such qualm with Disney star Cyrus. She delivers a tremendously sympathetic turn as Penny, and the heartfelt yearning in her voice immediately summons a strong audience connection to their own childhood pets. It’s in-house story artist and part-time voice actor Walton who really steals the show, though. Embodying the notion that everyone is the star of their own narrative, he puts a funny spin on the energetic, blinkered Rhino. For the full original review, from Screen International, click here. (Disney, PG, 96 minutes)
Kiss the Bride
Billed as a fun and sexy romantic comedy, and slapped with the tagline “Guess who’s coming out for the wedding!”, Kiss the Bride is in reality a rather forced and wearying gay(er) send-up of My Best Friend’s Wedding, directed in a very boxed-in, flat fashion by C. Jay Cox, the writer of the blockbuster Reese Witherspoon hit Sweet Home Alabama.
Scripted by by Ty Lieberman, the movie chronicles the impending nuptials of seemingly happy heterosexual couple Ryan (James O’Shea) and Alex (Tori Spelling, a bit less wince-inducing than usual), whose marriage is thrown into disarray by the arrival of Ryan’s old high school friend Matt (Phillip Karner, of Will & Grace and Sex and the City), now a hotshot, big city magazine editor. As the movie’s blowjob flashback sequence quickly establishes, Ryan and Matt had a fling in their teenage years. Matt may still even be in love with Ryan, who knows. A hard-boiled (and newly single, naturally) cynic, he drops everything when he finds out about the wedding. So as the big day fast approaches, old feelings resurface and secrets are revealed. Individually and collectively, the characters must balance the past with the present, and make choices that will determine the rest of their lives.
The first film produced by the Outfest Screenwriter’s Lab, a dynamic three-day, mentor-led workshop in Los Angeles ran by Outfest, the leading organization nurturing and preserving LGBT film images and artistry, Kiss the Bride, in its endgame, aims to be a somewhat realistic and messy exploration of the complex sexual landscape of today’s society. How it gets there, though, is a mess. Heartily embracing the, umm, very borrowed nature of its narrative roots (Matt’s assistant even tells him early on, “You are so Julia Roberts in My Best Friend’s Wedding right now!”), the movie quickly becomes a litany of fetishistic depictions (well-oiled shirtless guys in low-slung pants, the occasional shamrock tattoo) that come across as a heterosexual caricature of gay cinema. The jokes, meanwhile, are all easy and predictable, strung together scene-to-scene by rib-poking, upbeat ditties that serve as aural emotional placeholders. Furthermore, the film’s slapdash shooting schedule and production value are
underscored in a variety of scenes that devolve into lengthy, static
chatfests.
The exceptions, the scenes that do offer up a bit of spiked curiosity — another high school flashback to Matt and Ryan playing a game of “Battlestrip,” and doing shots out of paper cups, or a pre-bachelor party sequence in which Matt takes umbrage with the derogatory use of the word gay by a couple of Ryan’s redneck friends — either drag on too long or dip into a different tone that makes the film seem stilted and off-stride. Of course, nothing does that quite so much as Spelling’s earnest exhortion of, “You guys should fuck!” upon finding out about her fiancé’s predilection. Yes, Kiss the Bride is fascinating in some respects, but not always in the good sense of that word. Some of its bit players (a group that includes Joanna Cassidy, Robert Foxworth and Amber Benson) deliver maximum effort, but there’s not enough of wit or substance here to make this Bride worthy of a rental’s kiss.
Housed in a regular plastic Amray case, Kiss the Bride is presented in 16×9 widescreen, with Dolby digital 2.0 and Dolby digital 5.1 English language tracks. A feature-length audio commentary track kicks off the bonus materials, comprised of Karner, O’Shea and Cox. Their rapport is warm and winning, but they also spend a lot of time jokingly critiquing wardrobe and their bodies, which grows old. Other anecdotes include stories about Spelling’s allergies (she was apparently six to seven months pregnant when filming), a pancake-related continuity error, and the use of a trophy to simulate a bulge in Karner’s pants. Other supplemental extras include 13 minutes worth of deleted scenes (an extended bridal shopping sequence takes up a lot of this running time) with optional commentary from Cox; a 25-minute making-of featurette comprised of back-slapping interview tidbits interspersed with lots of clips from the movie; the theatrical trailer; a two-minute scrollable photo gallery montage; and previews for other Here! releases. To purchase Kiss the Bride on DVD via Amazon, click here. C (Movie) B (Disc)
The Stendhal Syndrome (Blu-ray)
An overlong and wildly uneven film and yet still in some ways one of the more brutally effective films of horror maestro Dario Argento’s latter-day canon, The Stendhal Syndrome stars the director’s daughter, Asia Argento, as a policewoman tracking down a violent serial killer and rapist. While trading chiefly in procedural elements not typically a part of Argento’s more explicit zombie horror flicks, the film still manages to showcase the filmmaker’s sensory flair and great touch in eliciting queasiness through stabbing shock.
The story centers around Anna Manni (Argento), a beautiful detective following the bloody trail of a sophisticated serial criminal (The Pianist’s Thomas Kretschmann) through the streets of
The Stendhal Syndrome takes what might be characterized as a few Hitchcockian elements — an imperiled woman, a strange psychological impairment, psychosexual perversion and mirrored identities — and places them in a blender. It’s obvious that the movie wants to also summon forth, in its own way, elements of The Silence of the Lambs and the mid-1980s oeuvre of Shannon Tweed, but the execution here is merely so-so for vast swatches of the movie’s two-hour running time, and the fairer Argento, just 20 when The Stendhal Syndrome was filmed over a decade ago, is a bit too young to pull off the necessary gravitas of a seasoned police inspector.
Anna’s hallucination sequences employ some relatively low-tech digital effects work, but it works in a way that’s not entirely corny. That said, does The Stendhal Syndrome induce its own hallucinatory stupor? No, there’s too much wild overreaching for parallelism here for things to cohere on a structural level. Yet while it doesn’t measure up to Suspiria or Inferno, a handful of moments in the film retain papa Argento’s visceral pop and effectiveness, so much so that certain scenes from The Stendahl Syndrome stuck with me in lingering fashion long after its initial viewing.
Previously edited outside of Italy, The Stendhal Syndrome is presented here in stunning high definition, transferred under the supervision of cinematographer Giuseppe Rotunno (Amarcord) from the original Italian 35mm interpositive. Split into two dozen chapters, the film is presented in 1.66:1 widescreen in 1080p HD resolution, with four audio options — English 7.1 DTS-HD, English 7.1 Dolby True HD, English 5.1 Dolby digital surround EX and Italian 5.1 Dolby digital surround EX — as well as optional English subtitles.
Running just under 20 minutes, the first interview is with Dario Argento himself, who discusses where The Stendhal Syndrome f
Eden
An intimate Irish drama about a married couple in crisis, Eden centers on Breda (Eileen Walsh) and Billy Farrell (Aidan Kelly), a seemingly normal pair approaching their 10th wedding anniversary. In private, their marriage shows signs of strain. As Billy begins to obsess over a younger woman, Breda searches for a way to preserve their bond, focusing on a shared night out at the pub as the solution to their malaise.
Adapted by Eugene O’Brien from his own stageplay, and skillfully directed by Declan Recks, Eden avoids many of the gritty, hand-held photographed clichés associated with the early kitchen-sink dramas of Mike Leigh, with which this film otherwise shares a few things in common. It’s spare, but never aggressively so, and constructed with a nice sense of composition. Walsh (The Magdalene Sisters) ably locates the desperate sadness at the core of Breda, yet Kelly (who looks like a cross between Colm Feore and Will Arnett, with a few minor acne scars) also deftly conveys how simple shame can color and warp personal choices. Watching him try to negotiate time and space at the local watering hole between his wife and a silent crush summons forth an angsty, melancholic adult version of the old sitcom story chestnut about juggling two prom dates. What on the surface seems a simple case of a wandering male eye, though, by the end of the film becomes a bit more complex, and heartrending. There’s a palpable tension in the air because one wants to see matters reconciled, and these characters stay together.
There is undeniably an element of distancing cultural specificity to the movie (something confirmed by a recent piece in Newsweek about the dramatic effect that the rash of British and Irish pub closings were having on respective national psyches), but at its core Eden is about romantic hope dangling on a string, and the curious, cavernous spaces between men and women, even — maybe especially — those who love each other. Surely that’s a universal story… no matter how briar patch-thick the accents are.For more information on the film, click here. (Liberation Entertainment, unrated, 83 minutes)
Thirst
Not to be confused with Jeremy Kasten’s terrible The Thirst, 1979’s Australian import Thirst, from director Rod Hardy, eschews Hammer or gothic interpretations of vampire lore for the more straightforward tale of a blood-sucking master race/criminal sect, and their efforts at a once-in-a-generation power-grab. The result, a solid genre production, stands as one of the top-shelf Australian horror flicks of its era.
Loosely based on the infamous myths surrounding real-life Hungarian countess Elizabeth Bathory (which Julie Delpy is prepping for a movie, and have already formed the basis of the deadly videogame within the film Stay Alive), Thirst‘s story centers around innocent, pure, unsuspecting Kate Davis (Chantal Contouri), a young woman kidnapped by a bloodthirsty cult looking to reestablish and purify their bloodline. After taking her to a remote village that serves as the hub of their sleek, modern blood-processing facility, the group’s leadership council — consisting of Dr. Fraser (David Hemmings), Dr. Gauss (Above the Law‘s Henry Silva), Mr. Hodge (Max Phipps) and Mrs. Barker (Shirley Cameron) — tell Kate that she’s the descendant of Bathory, and begin a systematic campaign of brainwashing in order to prepare her for her unholy fate. According to the prophecies of the so-called “Hyma Brotherhood,” Kate must fulfill her destiny by marrying their leader, in convoluted fashion thus helping them quench their eternal thirst for blood.
There’s some good, old-fashioned puncturing of jugulars, yes, but Thirst is mainly a movie about identity, paranoia, group-think and madness, in which its characters just happen to be vampires. There are trace elements of The Wicker Man and THX 1138, and elaborate set-ups for the group’s “Vampire Festival” could also be seen, without too much squinting, as a bizarro-world forerunner for Eyes Wide Shut, a demonic cult ritual where grotesque tortures are laying the groundwork for further psychosexual experimentation. The acting is for the most part tastefully underplayed (as are the purely prurient inclusions — a fleeting glimpse of Countouri’s side boob during a bloody shower sequence accounts for its only nudity), and composer Brian May makes some interesting choices in a strings-powered score, all of which help lend an air of mannered legitimacy to this otherwise fantastical tale.
Presented in a regular Amray plastic case, Thirst arrives to DVD in 2.35:1 anamorphic widescreen, with Dolby digital mono tracks in English and Spanish. In addition to an isolated music score, cast and filmmaker text biopgraphies and a small-ish photo gallery, there are also three TV spots and the movie’s original theatrical trailer. The biggest bonus feature, though, is easily the feature-length audio commentary track with director Hardy and producer Antony Ginnane, during which they discuss the film’s $750,000 January-February shoot (the hottest months, down under), the late blessing of securing an unused dairy farm for location filming, and a chopper accident involving Hemmings. To purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here. B+ (Movie) B (Disc)
AFI Fest, Per A Critical Moment
A Critical Moment’s Brad Schreiber offers up his take on the recently wrapped AFI Fest, including Waltz with Bashir (which I desperately need to work into the screening rotation), Norwegian import O’Horten, Paul Schrader’s Adam Resurrected and Nacho Vigalondo’s Sundance-minted Time Crimes, among others.
Quantum of Solace Rules Box Office
Quantum of Solace, with Daniel Craig returning as James Bond and va-voomish Olga Kurylenko satisfying the babe quotient in the
first direct sequel in the spy franchise, pulled in an estimated $68-plus million over opening weekend, nearly $30 million
more than its predecessor, 2006’s Casino Royale. The debut also easily bested the previous opening weekend record for a Bond flick, which was $47 million for 2002’s Die Another Day.
DreamWorks Animation’s Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa, which debuted at
No. 1 the previous weekend, slipped to second place with just over $35 million in receipts,
raising its 10-day domestic total to $117 million. Rounding out the top 10 were the R-rated comedy Role Models ($11.2 million, $37.6 million overall); High School Musical 3: Senior Year ($5.7 million, $84.2 million cumulatively); Clint Eastwood’s Changeling, starring Angelina Jolie ($4.3 million, $27.6 million overall); Kevin Smith’s raunchy Zack and Miri Make a Porno ($3.1 million, $26.5 million overall); Samuel L. Jackson and Bernie Mac’s Soul Men ($2.4 million, $9.4 million cumulatively); The Secret Life of Bees ($2.3 million, $33.6 million overall); the fifth installment in the Saw horror franchise ($1.8 million, $55.4 million overall); and the wince-inducing Beverly Hills Chihuahua ($1.6 million, $90.9 million overall). In limited release, Danny Boyle’s Slumdog Millionaire opened to $360,000 at 10 theaters, and A Christmas Tale, also starring Quantum of Solace villain Mathieu Almaric, opened to $63,800 on seven screens.
Is Slumdog Millionaire Rated R Because It Scares White People?
I touched on the ratings controversy surrounding Slumdog Millionaire at the end of my one-on-one interview with Danny Boyle, but I also recently exchanged a couple emails with friend and colleague Wade Major, who gave good voice to the ire and irritation surrounding the R rating with which the film is saddled. The capper of his response is excerpted below:
“I’ve been screaming about the racism factor in the decisions of CARA (Classification and Rating Administration) for years. It’s been unbelievably evident, time and time again. And in fairness, it has far less to do with racism than with cultural parochialism, as you could also make the case for Billy Elliott, as family-friendly a film as has ever been made. I’m sorry, but “Fuck” is about as offensive to people in Yorkshire as “Dang.” CARA doesn’t get that. Their primary motivation is not, as Jack Valenti always claimed, providing information for parents. Their goal is to keep government censors at bay, so they zero in on anything that a morality mandarin might flip out over… regardless of context or common sense. And more often than not, that ends up putting a lot of foreign films on unequal footing, particularly Asian films. They’ve never been able to wrap their heads around some of the stuff in Hong Kong movies, and the fact that someone running around with a hatchet in his back can, in context, be fun and/or funny. To them, it’s straight out of Friday the 13th. Fuckers.”
A Little Tropic Thunder Role Playing
Pegged to next Tuesday’s DVD release of Tropic Thunder, this site offers up an amusingly retro, 8-bit set-top game, in the old Contra mold.
Danny Boyle Talks Slumdog Millionaire
The same forward-leaning kinetic energy that marks a lot of British filmmaker Danny Boyle‘s work is also present and accounted for in any conversation with him. Ask him a question, any question, and he’ll enthusiastically rip into a breakneck-paced response, sometimes tripping over his words. There are no runaway, performance-instinct answers, a la Robin Williams. Rather, it’s just that Boyle seems to have a genuine joie de vivre that colors everything he does. His favorite word might be “extraordinary,” which he frequently delivers with punctuated, wide-eyed sincerity of a child.
Diversity and culturally explorative filmmaking is nothing new to Boyle, but his latest film is something of a departure even by his own bold-stroke standards. A most uncharacteristic underclass love story, the bristling Slumdog Millionaire is an engaging, exotic drama about a dirt-poor, 18-year-old orphan who stands poised on the precipice of winning 20 million rupees on an Indian game show. It’s an ironic protagonist, given that the movie, the People’s Choice Award winner at this year’s Toronto Film Festival, was originally set up at Warner Independent Pictures, then itself orphaned when corporate parent Warner Bros. saw their release slate swell after the acquisition of New Line, and cooled on the commercial prospects of the film, despite its unique combination of energy and heart. After some cattle-trading, Slumdog Millionaire was finally picked up by Fox Searchlight, who’ve released Boyle’s last three films, and with whom he has a relationship dating back more than a decade. Now, on the eve of his film’s Oscar-buzz-heavy release, I spoke with Boyle; the conversation is excerpted below.
Brent Simon: Were you familiar at all with the novel Q&A, by Vikas Swarup, before tackling the project?
Danny Boyle: They sent the script and the only description that they really gave was that it was a film about Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, and I remember thinking, “Well I’m not going to do that.” But it was written by Simon Beaufoy, who is a terrific writer, and so I thought I’d better read it, out of respect, so at least I could reply to him in a decent way. And I completely fell in love with it. But I read the book and it was irrelevant, really, to this extraordinary screenplay, because what he’d done is just kidnap the central idea — slum kid goes on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire and wins it, because his life experiences enable him to answer the questions they just happen to ask. But beyond that everything is Simon’s invention.
BS: To me, a portion of the film felt like a tweaked, re-contextualized Oliver Twist, with the character who rescues young brothers Salim and Jamal coming across as Fagin-esque. Was that a parallel that struck you?
DB:
Yeah, when I met Simon and talked to him about writing about the city,
he said, “It’s completely Dickensian.” He would feel it most acutely as
a writer, of course, but everybody else observed that in certain
scenes. It’s the extremes of the city; there are clearly parallels with
London in the Victorian era, which is what Dickens was writing about,
and led to that heightened, melodramatic, very story-oriented
storytelling. The city is like that, just throwing stuff at you the
entire time. I mean, if you keep bored there you need to get medical
help, because it’s so extraordinary. And obviously London must have
been like that when it was growing, and I guess Manhattan as well, in
those periods when they’re just exploding, and you have these vast poor
populations helping create this enormous, staggering wealth on top of
it.
BS: So many times when we see a film set in a slum there tends to be
a tendency on the part of a lot of filmmakers to ennoble and
romanticize the area, and this film doesn’t quite do that. Instead, it
aims more to capture the vivacity of an area like that, where many
people have so little and yet there’s this shared, surging, aspirant
energy.
DB: It’s also pride, I think. We worked in a couple of the slums, including Dharavi, which is a massive slum; they think about two million people live in it. Everyone was so helpful to us, you know? All they said was, “Just don’t keep saying we’re poor the whole time, because we don’t think we’re poor, we don’t look at it like that. We’re trying.” They’re very industrious, very organized, but they don’t have any sanitation, they don’t have any running water, there’s unreliable electricity, which is stolen and fed-in and stuff like that. But none of that’s their fault, really. They’re making the best of what they’ve got, and they are doing a remarkable job, really. So you can’t help but feel tremendous admiration for them. You can’t not show that they’re poor — and there are some horrors, you can’t stint that either — but it also has this extraordinary redemptive energy about it, and it’s because life is lived there in fast forward. I think in modern society we stare in wonder at these cities that explode; we’re pouring into cities, all of us. And I think also you get a sense of how cities are going to have to be in the future, because you can learn a lot. Although it looks behind us in terms of infrastructure, you get a glimpse of the future, ironically. It’s too many people sharing too few resources, and how are you going to do that calmly and peacefully? For the most part they do, somehow. There are these occasional, terrible religious riots, which are shockingly violent, but most of the time they do manage to live side-by-side, and on top of one another, and with not enough water to go around. And maybe not in our lifetimes, but that’s going to be a massive problem in the next 50 or 100 years.
BS: In that regard, at least, Kevin Costner’s Waterworld will prove prophetic.
DB: (laughs) Yes!
BS: You’d worked previously with your cinematographer, Anthony Dod Mantel, but I was interested to learn that you had to scrap the initial visual approach to the film.
DB: Well, I wasn’t sure about doing it in film. Anthony, like any cinematographer, to be honest, wants it to endure on celluloid, because it’s such a gift for a cinematographer — there’s so much to look at, so much color range, and the light is so extraordinary because of the pollution and the dust, and the mass of humanity that’s there. So we did a test on it, and I didn’t like it. It confirmed what I felt, that I didn’t want to make it in that way. So, credit to him, he came up with this digital system called an SI-2K, which is a hard drive that sits on the cameraman’s back in a rucksack. And the camera is then quite small in the hand, and it’s very flexible and very dynamic for city scenes. I absolutely loved it. So we set out to try to capture the city, but in an accumulative way. We didn’t set out to say, “Wow, look at that,” which is sort of very tempting to do in India, because there’s so many extraordinary pictorial moments. But we abandoned that, we just tried to accumulate the city, and felt that by the end of it the audience will have felt the color, the light, the vivacity of the place.
BS: To my mind, so many films that use a hand-held style use it in a default lazy fashion, as if hand-held camerawork by itself equals intense. With this film, while watching it, I scrawled in big letters in my notes, “visual/character identification,” because the visual approach underscored and implored a deeper identification with the space, and therefore the characters themselves.
DB: Absolutely, I hope so. The film begins very deliberately with huge close-ups, and then you literally drop off a cliff and start hurtling through the city, and it’s a completely subjective approach to the film, so that you’re with the characters. There’s no sense of objectivity, standing back, wide shots, things like that. Because you’re a white guy, and a white writer going in there making a film about local residents. And the only way that you’re ever really get inside those characters is by literally trying to live their lives with them with a camera just beside them. It felt very much that we should subjectify the film like that, and these digital cameras really helped do that because they’re incredibly flexible. There were teething problems with them, because they’re a prototype, and the biggest one was keeping the hard drive cool, because they didn’t have a fan system worked out. So we had to have blocks of dry ice around the notebook in this rucksack. So there were extraordinary moments in these slums where we had a dry ice factory pouring out dry ice in the middle of this blistering heat in Bombay. It was bizarre!
BS: Your also filmed rehearsals. Was that atypical, and dictated by the new environment?
DB: It was partly that. I’ve also learned to do that. What you get when your crew turns up, especially when you’re abroad, is this very lazy time that you’re paying for when they want to settle in. They call it checking camera equipment, doing the tests, all this. And of course I’ve seen it. There’s just settling in, hanging around. And so the advantage of digital is that it doesn’t really cost anything to shoot, not like celluloid, where you’re paying money to buy, develop and print it — so on Slumdog Millionaire I said straightaway that I’ll do half a day’s rehearsals with the actors, and you can do your preparation, and then for the other half of the day we’re going to go out and shoot. And everyone said, “Whoah, whoah, whoah, we’re not ready!” And I said, “No, it’s fine, it’s a test, really. If it’s not good, I won’t use it.” So we did two weeks of this, and managed to accumulate stuff for the (aforementioned) chase, for instance, but also there was a hotel called the Tulip Star, which was empty and locked in a decade-long court case. But they do hire it out by the day to film crews. So we rehearsed and shot a couple scenes set in a busy hotel there, and then ended up keeping it, because I thought we couldn’t better it in a crowded hotel. So you end up making little incremental gains like that, that get you ahead. And then you have a chance to then use your budget to make the film appear bigger, and more epic than your six or seven million British pounds suggest you’re going to be able to do. It’s just being canny like that, really, but it’s also the best way to learn to use new equipment — to get out there and use it. And if it’s a disaster and we don’t use anything, it doesn’t matter because it was a rehearsal day, you don’t have to fill in any report forms.
BS: What about casting the child actors — how difficult was that?
DB: The kids were a really interesting case, because the film was written and financed because it was in English. I had to reassure the financiers that the accents would be fine. But when we got there and started casting, the kids that we started seeing who could speak English at seven years old were not the right kids. They were very middle-class kids, different than the slum kids that you would see. So we brought some of the latter in, but it meant we had to translate it into Hindi, which we duly d
id, and of course it became completely alive. The kids, so many of them there, are fantastic little actors, because they have no fear, they love movies. It’s like America, just a part of life. I remember ringing up Warner Bros., having to tell them that a third of the film was now going to be in Hindi, with subtitles.
BS: And how did they take that?
DB: (laughs maniacally) Oh, you can imagine, they were over the moon — so delighted! They would say, “Oh, well we can enter it for Best Foreign Language Film.” But because we hadn’t taken too much money, I can just about get away with it, bully my way through something like that one. And I also said, “Look, the subtitles will be really exciting once you see them.” So anyway, there is a barrier, because you can’t communicate directly with them, and judge it as accurately as you can normally. But basically you can tell, even in a foreign language, whether someone is doing it right, it’s just a feeling you get as you watch them. And then I had a casting director, Loveleen Tandan, who we made the co-director, because she spent so much time on the set with the kids and then helping me culturally.
BS: What about Dev Patel, who plays the 18-year-old Jamal?
DB: I’d phoned everyone in Bollywood, really, everyone in Mumbai, but I couldn’t find the main guy because the guys there are like bodybuilders, that’s the look everyone is looking for. So all the young kids, the 18-year-olds, looked wrong — they would have sat in that chair, on the show, and just looked like a fucking wrestler or something. I thought that wasn’t right. And my daughter recommended that I watch this show Skins, and I watched him and he had a small comic part and was good. And so I met him and he looked right, he looked vulnerable and fragile. You got to do that, because he’s cunning. What he does, as well as in an obvious but predictable way, is win the show, but also he’s hijacking the show because he has a complete other agenda that nobody knows about. He’s going on the show not to win the money, really. So he’s got to be tough as fuck to do that, but he has to look vulnerable so that you can’t quite work out what his game plan is. So Dev was wonderful, because he has a tough side, is very funny and enjoyable, but is also serious about the acting, and has real application as well.
BS: To your mind, is there a legitimate ratings controversy with the film?
DB: I was very disappointed, yeah, because in the original contract with Warner Bros. in America you have to say that the film will not be longer than a time you agree on — with us it was two hours — and you have to agree that it’ll be a PG-13 or lower. So I deliberately shot everything to get that certificate because I take those contracts very seriously. And then the MPAA saw it and said it was too intense, and we said OK, we appealed for advice about how to reduce sufficiently. And they came back and said there’s no point in trying to do anything about it really, because the overall journey is too intense. Because in fact I think they realized when they went back to look at it that I had shot it to get a PG-13, there’s no particular moments in it where you see anything that shocking, really. It’s implied. I guess it is intense, because it’s an intense city. But you’ve got to do it justice, both in joy and in horror — they both sit alongside one another the whole time.
BS: Do you have anything else definitively on tap next?
DB: No, there isn’t actually. I was going to do an animated film, but that’s fallen apart, sadly. It doesn’t look like something I’d return to, which is a shame, because it really would have taken people by surprise. (laughs) I mean, I loved it when George Miller, who’d done Mad Max, turned up with Happy Feet, this all-singing, all-dancing animated film about penguins — talk about blindsiding people! And it’s unusual for me to even have anything partially set up, because I tend to do one thing at a time.
For more on Slumdog Millionaire, click here for a review, or click here to visit its official web site. For Boyle’s thoughts on the state of English cinema, meanwhile, click here.
Aero Hosts Early Australia Screening
It’s still not listing an official, final running time, but Baz Luhrmann’s Australia will be done in time for its November 26 theatrical release… and even a little bit earlier, since it seems like the writer-director’s sweeping new romantic adventure drama, set in the continent down under on the explosive brink of World War II, will screen at the Aero Theatre in Santa Monica on Saturday, November 22 at 7:30 p.m., followed by a moderated discussion with the filmmaker. The following evening, Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet and Moulin Rouge will also screen, as a double-feature.
The Aero Theatre
is located at 1328 Montana Avenue in Santa Monica
information on directions and the Aero’s upcoming schedule,
phone (323) 466-FILM.
Slumdog Millionaire
From Shallow Grave and Trainspotting to Millions and 28 Days Later, the filmography of Danny Boyle is littered with many different types of movies, but they’re all marked by a similar intensity and forward-leaning energy. It’s somewhat strangely appropriate, then, that for his latest film, the bristling, underclass love story Slumdog Millionaire, the British-born Boyle would head to the slums of India, where life is lived in fast-forward.
With a population of 19 million and still growing rapidly, Mumbai is, by most estimates, set to overtake Tokyo in a decade’s time as the world’s most populous city. The high-contrast mix of heartbreaking poverty, crime, technological advancement and surging, aspirant optimism all make for a perfectly jumbled, Dickensian backdrop for an engaging drama about a dirt-poor orphan who stands poised on the precipice of winning 20 million rupees on an Indian game show.
Scrawny 18 year-old Jamal Malik (Dev Pate, above leftl) nurses a crush on Latika (Freida Pinto, above right), a fellow street urchin whom he’s known since a hardscrabble childhood shared with his brother Salim (Madhur Mittal). Now, with a whole nation watching, laconic Jamal is just one question away from winning the jackpot on India’s version of Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? But when the show breaks for the evening, at the behest of its preening, patronizing host (Anil Kapoor) police arrest Jamal on suspicion of cheating. Desperate to prove his innocence, Jamal tells the police inspector (Irfan Khan) the story of his life in the slum where he and his brother grew up — of their many adventures, of vicious encounters with local gangs, and of course of Latika, the girl he’s loved and yet repeatedly lost.
Slumdog Millionaire is more than passingly reminiscent of Fernando Meirelles’ Oscar-nominated City of God, in the manner in which, within the framework of a fraternal narrative, it assays crippling poverty, and the doom it often portends. Yet I also found myself thinking again and again of Oliver Twist and, unlikely though it may seem, Romeo & Juliet. Boyle’s film opens in the present day, but then jumps back and forth in time, with each chapter of Jamal’s increasingly layered story revealing where he learned answers to the show’s increasingly difficult trivia questions. This approach helps give the movie a sense of fated, epic scale, no matter the relatively meager $14 million budget.
As with many of his films, including his last one, Sunshine, Boyle’s visual approach is heavy on canted angles and color saturation. Unlike that film, though, cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantel’s work here is a much more natural match with the story, imploring a deeper identification with the space, and thus the characters. Boyle’s deft artistry even extends to the film’s subtitles (roughly the first third is in Hindi), which are unfold on differently color backgrounds, spread across the screen. Exotic, but never condescendingly so, Slumdog Millionaire locates the lamplight of human desire, and proves that it burns all across the world, no matter circumstance, ethnicity or religion. (Fox Searchlight, R, 120 minutes)
South Carolina Priest is a Massive Douchebag
From the intersection of religion, politics and douchiness comes this guy, a South Carolina priest who says his congregants who voted for Barack Obama shouldn’t take communion until they’ve done penance for supporting the man he called “the most radical pro-abortion politician ever to serve in the United States Senate or run for president.”
Happy Birthday, Olga Kurylenko
It’s a happy 29th birthday to Ukrainian Quantum of Solace hottie Olga Kurylenko, who does her best impression of a naked pretzel in the undated photo below.
Good stuff, that… in general, a much more flattering pose for women than men. Like many poses, actually.
Burn▪E Gets Spin-Off on Wall▪E DVD
Wall▪E hits DVD and Blu-ray next Tuesday, November 18, on
a streamlined single-disc version as well
as a three-disc special edition. The single-disc release will include
an audio commentary track with director Andrew Stanton; deleted scenes; Presto, the animated short shown prior to the movie in theaters; a sneak peek of Wall▪E’s Tour of the Universe; a
special featurette with sound designer/voice of Wall▪E Ben Burtt; and an all-new animated short featuring little sidekick robot Burn▪E (below).
The triple-disc DVD will include all the above items, plus: The Pixar Story,
Leslie Iwerks’ documentary history of Pixar’s beginnings; a look at
Wall▪E’s treasures and trinkets; a look inside the Buy ‘N’ Large
corporation featured in the movie; even more deleted scenes; an
interactive storybook and games; several making-of featurettes, and
much more. The film will release in Blu-ray in both two-disc and three-disc versions; both will include BD Live capabilities.
Pray the Devil Back to Hell
A brisk, affecting and tightly coiled documentary snapshot of the transformative power of moral courage, Pray the Devil Back to Hell tells the remarkable story of a group of fed-up women whose demonstrations and non-violent demands for peace finally helped transform their war-ravaged homeland of Liberia. During a brutal, decade-long campaign that displaced one-third of the country’s population, Liberia’s poor were held hostage between self-anointed President Charles Taylor and thuggish warlord factions jockeying for their own future power. Standing up against rape, murder and child militias, the struggle of these women would eventually culminate with the exile of Taylor and the election of Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, Africa’s first elected female head of state.
Giving wide berth to their inspiring interview subjects, director Gina Reticker and originating producer Abigail Disney construct a film that is heart-rending and enraging in equal measure, even if they don’t scratch much beyond the surface of some of the more interesting subcomponents of the story — which include the potentially fractious working union between Christian and Muslim congregations, as well as a coercive sex strike to bend husbands to their cause. Human understanding and betterment are achieved mostly through bearing witness, and this film, similar in mission to the work of the Shoah Visual History Foundation, provides powerful firsthand testimony of the capacity for decency to eventually trump evil. For more information on the film, click here. (Balcony Releasing, unrated, 72 minutes)
Happy Birthday, Anne Hathaway
It’s a happy birthday to Anne Hathaway, who turns 26 today, and probably doesn’t celebrate by calling imprisoned ex-beau Raffaello Follieri. After two hit Disney flicks opposite Julie Andrews, plus turns in Ella Enchanted and Nicholas Nickleby, Hathaway began an earnest, concerted effort to shed her princess-y image with the 2005 one-two topless punch of Brokeback Mountain, for which she beat out Sienna Miller and dozens of other actresses, and Barbara Kopple’s Havoc (below). For many actresses, of course, that means playing hookers, stripper drug fiends, black widow femme fatales, or some combination thereof.
In savvy fashion, though, Hathaway has run an end-around on topless convention. Brokeback Mountain, of course, was a supporting role in an Oscar-bait project, but the fact that it was a movie about, you know, gay cowboys guaranteed that it would be remembered — or at least publicly discussed — chiefly for other reasons. While Havoc rather inexplicably went straight-to-video — something Hathaway couldn’t have counted on, nor wished — it was a gritty, class-clash suburban-teens-gone-wild picture, kind of like a more hardcore crazy/beautiful, spiced with barrio authenticity. Another legit film, in other words.
So basically Hathaway gets total cred with the drooling Maxim crowd, because the movies are Internet-searchable, yet she takes no hit with female audiences for tackling a sex bomb role, which often results in dramatically diminished same-sex appeal, as Angelina Jolie (among others) will attest. Now, in this fall’s Rachel Getting Married, Hathaway plays the (recovering) drug fiend… without getting naked, thank you very much.
Columbia Best Pictures Collection Makes DVD Gifting Simple
This holiday season, 11 of Columbia Pictures’ Academy Award-winning films hit DVD for the first time, in a 14-disc collection that streets on November 18, accompanied by a beautiful 62-page linen covered book. The set includes Gandhi, Lawrence of Arabia, The Bridge on the River Kwai, All the King’s Men (not the 2006 remake, though there’s a review of that film with special personal reminiscence here, if you need it), Kramer vs. Kramer, Oliver!, From Here to Eternity, You Can’t Take It With You, It Happened One Night, A Man For All Seasons and On the Waterfront. That’s 64 Oscar wins in all, for those wondering. To purchase the set via Amazon, click here.
Linewatch
It might not be saying much, really, but Linewatch, an especially attractively shot and generally well made Southwestern border drama, could be Cuba Gooding, Jr.’s best leading role since at least Men of Honor and possibly even Boyz N the Hood — certainly better than the claptrap like Dirty and Hero Wanted that’s cluttered up his recent filmography. It’s been a strange, prolonged post-Oscar debasement for Gooding, Jr., and there’s a melancholic depression that’s blanketed many of his performances in the last half dozen years, all but eradicating memories of his ebullient turn in 1996’s Jerry Maguire. This film, while still finding Gooding, Jr. in more or less down-shifted mode, has enough character shading and other things going for it to strike a chord for patient filmgoers willing to give him another chance. It may ultimately not be the type of showy fare to lift him up out of Actor Jail, but it does work well for what it is.
Linewatch centers around Michael Dixon (Gooding, Jr.), a father and border patrol officer in a small, dusty New Mexico desert town who, in quick order, discovers nine dead illegal immigrants stuffed in a van, suffers the shooting of his partner, and tangles with a group of rogue, militia-style border roamers who make it their business to round up Mexicans in brutish, bounty-hunter-esque fashion. If all that’s not bad enough, Michael’s secret past also catches up with he and his wife Angela (Sharon Leal), in the form of his old Los Angeles gang leader, Kimo (Omari Hardwick, of Gridiron Gang). After a shipment of drugs is accidentally disrupted by Michael’s actions, Kimo tracks Michael down and blackmails him into helping smuggle goods across the border. Further complicating matters is the fact that Michael finds his nephew, Lonnie (Evan Ross), under sway of these negative influences, which awakens a latent sense of responsibility.
Yes, the drama here is all of a relatively familiarly milked variety (a reformed man’s choice between “the life he swore to leave behind” and his threatened young family), but David Warfield’s script is above average in dialogue and plotting, and director Kevin Bray locates the truthfulness in his actors and a similar honesty in the staging, not aiming for amped-up theatrics just in an effort to make an impression, and book his next gig. There’s a pinch here (just a pinch, mind you) of the same forelorn undercurrent on display in last year’s Oscar-winning No Country for Old Men, but also enough tension and thrills to service fans of Walking Tall-type vigilante tales like Conspiracy.
Working with cinematographer Paul Sommers, Bray also shoots a gorgeous film; not only are the natural landscapes and Southwestern magic hour captured with grace and beauty, but there’s an unusual care paid to the composition for a straight-to-video thriller of this nature. All of these things help give Linewatch a bump in production value and watchability… and bring Gooding, Jr. himself into focus a bit, too.
Housed in a regular Amray plastic case stored in a cardboard slipcover with slightly raised lettering, Linewatch is presented in 2.40:1 anamorphic widescreen, and mastered in high definition. It comes with an English language Dolby digital audio track, a wide array of subtitles, and alternate language audio options are also available. The disc’s sole supplemental element is a 19-minute making-of featurette; though rife with intercut film footage, it does include on-set interview snippets with all the principal players, on-screen and off-, and plenty of anecdotes, including producer Reuben Liber talking about Bray showing up with two duffle bags full of books that formed the inspiration for his visual approach to the movie. Rounding out the disc are previews for Tortured, Felon and eight or nine other Sony home video releases. To purchase DVD via Amazon, click here. B (Movie) C+ (Disc)
Vera Farmiga Talks Fall Two-Fer, Indie Film That Started It All
After years of hefty television work and playing ruinous indie film heroines, Vera Farmiga is now the definition of an in-demand actress, with more than a dozen films in the last four years, including memorable turns in Wayne Kramer’s Running Scared and the Oscar-winning The Departed. She’s back this fall with roles in two high-profile dramas, Mark Herman’s The Boy in the Striped Pajamas and writer-director Rod Lurie’s Nothing But the Truth. In the former she’s a German wife and mother who unravels as she finds out more about her husband’s complicity in prosecuting Adolf Hitler’s Final Solution; in the latter, she’s an undercover CIA agent who gets outed in the press, and is none too happy about it. I spoke one-on-one recently with Farmiga, almost seven months pregnant but still in great spirits, about her work, the little indie film that jump-started her career and how happy she is not to be living in New York City or Los Angeles. For the full Q&A, from New York Magazine‘s Vulture, click here.
Step Up, Make It Happen… and Dance!
Could this poster for the direct-to-video Make It Happen, starring Mary Elizabeth Winstead, be any more of a straight-up gangsta rip-off of the rain-machine-friendly one-sheet for Step Up 2 the Streets? It lacks the volume of precipitation, I guess. Otherwise, I’m hoping someone at DeVry DVD Box Cover Design School got to knock off early for a long weekend.