Tonight, Dook flops. And hopefully takes the “L” they so richly deserve.
All posts by Brent
Reese Witherspoon Has a New Secret Acting Weapon: M&Ms
A rogue asteroid helps turn Reese Witherspoon‘s Susan Murphy into Ginormica in Monsters vs. Aliens, the latest big 3-D animated feature lurking on the release horizon. Excerpts from a specially convened press conference last December, where Witherspoon and other cast members talked about the making of the film.
Question: How did you get your head around doing the voice for an animation film?
Reese Witherspoon: It’s sort of an interesting process. I went in to meet Jeffrey Katzenberg as just a general thought, an idea, once I started seeing some of the DreamWorks Animation movies over and over again at my house with my children. We had a meeting and he walked me though the process of what they do and I ended up seeing the storyboards for this movie and I got very excited. It seemed like such a good idea. It all revolved around this great image of my character sitting on the roof of the gas station, which was really cool. So we signed on and, I guess, about a year later, I started doing recording, which I like to call “actor in a box.” (laughs) It was great. I’d never really done voiceover work before, so it was really helpful to have Rob and Conrad there to walk me through everything because it’s so stop-and-go, and you pick up scenes here and there, and then you double back and get them again.
Q: You’re a gorgeous, petite woman so how did it feel to play a 49-foot-and-three-quarter-inch tall woman? How did you act that?
RW: They sort of walked me through the process of her as she was growing and growing, and what it was like. And they had to constantly give me the perspective too, because Insectosaurus is much bigger than me and then the alien robots are even bigger. (laughs) So it was constantly like, “Look up, and there it is!” or “Project further.” And she gets her strength and really enjoys having that super power. She gets stronger and more deeply involved with the voice work.
Q: Do you have any favorite ’50s B-movies?
RW: Yeah, my dad used to watch those Roger Corman movies late at night. He’s obsessed with Corman. Apparently he found out some way you can intern for Corman if you just give him $5,000 so he’s in the queue. He’s waiting for his opportunity, for his number to be pulled.
Q: Do you have any childhood memories of 3-D?
RW: I just remember being really nearsighted when I was little. I had those giant glasses so I had to put the 3-D glasses over the glasses, and that makes it kind of difficult and a little bit confusing. But we took care of all that. It’s not going to be like that anymore.
Q: What was most challenging about playing Ginormica?
RW: Just the running — there’s so much action in the movie that they had to run through, so the directors would be like (breathless voice), “Okay, now you’re running, now you’re being chased by a giant, alien robot! Now he’s over your left shoulder. No! He’s over your right shoulder! Now you’re on your giant roller skates, which are really cars strapped to your feet!” So I had to do all that, and I guess that was kind of a funny thing. To get really good energy, I’d always have to eat an entire pack of M&Ms.
Q: You’re a great role model, but who do you look up to?
RW: I admire a lot of people who manage to have great careers and a family life, and have managed to keep their feet on the ground; Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward were a great inspiration. Also people who do great things with their celebrity, and manage to create opportunities for other people who really need it. I think that’s a great thing.
David Lynch Photography Exhibit Bows in Germany
A new collection of photographs by David Lynch premiered at a show in Dusseldorf, as this clip details. Apart from some brief comments by Lynch, it’s all in German, but there’s some great shots of the work and we also learn that apparently there’s no German translation for “extreme close-up.”
Taking of Pelham 123 Poster Reveals Battle of Goatees
The poster for Tony Scott’s summer remake of The Taking of Pelham 123 has “launched” over at JoBlo (read: been handed over as a piece of head-patting exclusive content), and it’s a two-tone, brown-and-blue affair that reminds me of nothing so much as The Bone Collector, for some reason. Who will win the battle of goatees between Denzel Washington and John Travolta? Does this product make a cameo appearance? And does Travolta eventually lift up his shirt and reveal the words tatted on his belly: T-H-U-G L-I-F-E?
Salma Hayek’s Breasts Designated U.N. Ambassadors
Salma Hayek’s breasts have been tabbed as U.N. ambassadors (at least to starving African children), a designation that’s been a long time coming.
The International
The Bourne Identity was released in the summer of 2002, and owing to both the changes in the real world post-September 11 as well as the commercial success of that film and its subsequent sequels, since then every spy thriller worth its salt has had to ground itself in greyer times. Even the James Bond franchise — notoriously stingy about embracing change — brought in Daniel Craig after Die Another Day, and OK’ed a grittier franchise reboot that returned to the secret agent’s roots.
It’s in this murkier, tough reality that The International unfolds, directed by German-born Tom Tykwer, who in 1999 set film school imaginations afire with the adrenalized import Run, Lola, Run. A moderately tough sell because of its ambition, complexity and the fact that almost all of its action is contained in a single mid-film burst, The International is a globe-trotting law-and-action hybrid that melds investigatory procedural maneuvering with some covert head-crowning.
Louis Salinger (Clive Owen) is a disgraced Scotland Yard detective turned Interpol agent working from afar with Manhattan district attorney Eleanor Whitman (Naomi Watts) on a case involving one of the world’s most powerful banks, and the impending sale of missile guidance system technology. It looks like there’s a compelling claim to be tried in court, until both Louis’ partner and a potential witness separately turn up dead. Louis and Eleanor have their suspicions, but can’t prove anything. Spurned for direct information at their imposing Luxembourg headquarters — a perfect metaphorical stand-in for the evil machinations of this huge corporate machine — Louis starts working a separate evidentiary strand, a mysterious assassin (Brian O’Byrne) believed to be used by the International Bank of Business & Credit, with the hope of eventually using him to bring down the head of the company (Ulrich Thomsen).
With its skittery keyboard score and cabal of moneyed string-pullers, The International is a mega-corporate takedown thriller, a modern-day The Parallax View by way of Syriana and Michael Clayton. It skulks, in other words. Yet if the film, as conceived, is at its core a rendered judgment on the nature of man — with Louis having to grapple with the essential question of whether he should abandon his own ideals, and playing within the system, for the greater good of society — it takes a step back in its finale, afraid to let its protagonist fully, individually come to grips with the weight of his decisions.
In this sense, as penned by debut screenwriter Eric Singer, The International is a perfectly good and engrossing adult-level film that doesn’t really take a full, hearty swing at greatness. It toes the line, but in the end blinks. Overall, the dialogue is fairly unexceptional, but the performances are engaging and Tykwer’s staging is smart and crisp. There’s a fun “New York City moment” that fuels one close escape, when Eleanor and Louis honk their way out of a traffic jam, and Tykwer turns an incidental clandestine meeting into a fantastically over-the-top shootout at the Guggenheim’s main rotunda, amidst a massive video installation. The moment is more than a bit silly; upon reflection, it’s bat-shit crazy, plain and simple. It’s also the brawny set piece that pays for the rest of the chess match. So I didn’t mind. (Sony, R, 117 minutes)
Polanski
Polish-born filmmaker Roman Polanski‘s life itself reads like a movie, full of its own dramatically cinematic highs
and lows, which is perhaps why multi-hyphenate Damian Chapa decided to dive headlong into this biopic, being peddled largely on its “unauthorized” pedigree. Other words might better describe the film, however — chief among them the phrase “fantastically terrible.”
Working from a script co-written with Carlton Holder, Chapa fashions a movie that opens like a 100-yard dash, cramming virtually all the big set piece scenes of Polanski’s early life — a childhood in which he survives horrors of the Holocaust survivor, a creative upswing of the late 1960s, the shocking Manson murders that leave him a sudden widower, and the famous 1977 statutory rape case which ends with him becoming a fugitive
felon — into its opening five minutes. The rest of the movie then indiscriminately jumps around. We see Polanski (Chapa) woo Sharon Tate (Brienne DeBeau) prior to production on The Fearless Vampire Killers, and take on a menacing “special consultant” for Rosemary’s Baby. There’s partying, and shop talk with producer pal Gene Gutowski (Paul Sanders). Flashbacks to young Roman (Kevin de Ridder) are rendered in black-and-white.
There are also a couple weird sidebar digressions throughout (a scene with Frank Sinatra telling a minion, “Let’s send her her walking papers,” and Mia Farrow then receiving divorce notification on the set of her cinematic collaboration with Polanski), but Polanski doesn’t fully capture its subject’s Napoleonic arrogance, and it’s additionally far too riddled with jaw-dropping inaccuracies (the specifics of his rape arrest) and wild flights-of-fancy (a Nazi-themed flashback just before Polanski commits his infamous sexual assault) to be taken seriously as having any sort of psychological insightfulness. Most egregious of these spurious, denigrating strands might be a brief, tasteless scene which posits that Polanski was paid by tabloid photographers to pose next to evidence at the scene of the Tate murder — namely, the word “pig” scrawled on the wall in his fiancée’s blood.
Visually, the film is framed in coffin-tight fashion, in an effort to mask its meager production means. This grates, certainly, but its mortal sins are mostly related to story, and acting; almost all the dialogue is wincingly on-the-nose, and while Chapa, who once played Lyle Menendez in a TV movie about the parent-slaying brothers, at least slow-peddles Polanski’s legendary impish charm, he doesn’t have the range to convey the hole-in-his-heart sociopathy that informs the dark lens through which Polanski views the world, and thus operates in manipulative fashion. There are also repeated, confounding lapses in logic based on what we see unfold on screen. Late in the movie, producer Gutowski says that he “waited for the real Roman to surface” all through Polanski’s courtship with Tate — this despite the fact that we’ve seen the two of them have a conversation about Tate… over the naked body of another Polanski conquest!
The one story thread that holds any dark sway involves a Satanic consultant (Thomas Deuilhet) hired for the sake of authenticity on Rosemary’s Baby, but eventually Polanski even fritters away this spooky allegorical menace, positing that the character is quite literally the devil, and sets Manson acolyte Susan Atkins on the path that leads to the murder of Tate after meeting her at a bar. What? Yes, seriously. A jumbled, whorish, opportunistic hot mess, Polanski definitively proves that “bold” and “good” are not always synonymous. For more information on the film, click here. (Amadeus Pictures, R, 89 minutes)
James Gray Talks Two Lovers, New Film with Brad Pitt
With his latest film, writer-director James Gray steps somewhat outside his comfort zone, and the criminal-familial narrative preoccupations that informed the informal trilogy of his first three movies — Little Odessa, The Yards and We Own the Night. The acutely sketched love-triangle drama Two Lovers stars Joaquin Phoenix, Gwyneth Paltrow and Vinessa Shaw, and opens in limited release February 13. Gray spoke to a small roundtable group of reporters last week, and excerpts from the conversation follow below:
James Gray: (looking at recorders) Wow, I remember when I started making movies they were these huge things, you know, with tape cassettes. Now all of a sudden they’re these tiny little things. Pretty soon you’ll be all like putting like a little dot in the middle [of the table], then after a while you’re not going to put anything down, you’re just going to go, “Oh no, it’s implanted in my ear.”
Question: So you’re known as a New York filmmaker. What is it about New York on film that you think speaks not just to you but to audiences in general?
JG: Well, it’s hard to say what speaks for audiences in general; I wish I knew. If I did, I’d be in different shape. I can only say the one thing you’re really striving for I think — at least that I am — is to bring a certain emotional authenticity to the work. And I guess the best avenue I have is to make it as personal and as autobiographical as I can. I grew up in a semi-attached row house in Queens in New York, with my family. And my grandparents and my father are from Brooklyn, so you’re essentially an outer boroughs kid, growing up. You’re trying to view the world really through rose-colored glasses. It’s difficult because Manhattan is so fantastic and it’s nine miles away and all these cool rich people live there and have great lives, and you live in a semi-attached row house in Queens. I suppose that you try to steal from your past and try and make it as personal as you can. So that’s part of who I am, and I suppose that’s why it’s made its way into movies. And New York is very different from anywhere else in the country. You know, New York was settled mostly by the Dutch so the cultural tradition, I think, of New York — they say it’s an island off the coast of the United States or something. And I think the reason for that is really because the rest of the country, or at least certainly New England, was founded by the Puritans and has an English background. I think that New York itself feels different. I hope this makes some sense, you know? But it feels very different from Boston for example. Boston has an almost patrician, puritanical [feeling], while New York is a very different place. So all of this interests me, and winds up making its way into the movies.
Q: Well, there’s also certain relationships that can only happen in New York, because you can just happen upon people, and be shouting across the way from people. That just wouldn’t exist in L.A.
JG: That’s so true. I have two young children and it’s always very… upsetting is the wrong word, but it concerns me that they grow up here because a very good way of experiencing life, a very important aspect of human development and imagination is the ability and the idea of [making creative] connections. So if I’m walking down the street with my son in New York — he’s three years old — and all of a sudden there’s a zydeco band playing in Lincoln Center, which has happened, and he says, “Daddy, what’s that music?” Now I have Zydeco music at home but I’d have to think about it beforehand, take it out of the CD rack, put it in and play him zydeco music. In New York he can discover zydeco music without me having to bring it up. Or I’ll walk down the street and in the window there will be a book about the sculpture of Barnett Newman or something that I never thought about. I have a book, but I’d have to look it up. In other words, there’s a constant flow of ideas in New York. Los Angeles has everything you want, the opera in Los Angeles is excellent. It’s not as big as the Met, obviously, and they do like nine [concerts] a year or whatever as opposed to 25 but they’re great. You just have to know about them, get in your car, drive, park, get out, go — as opposed to walking down the street in New York, and you see a poster and say, “Oh, that’s at the Met this week,” and you can get out and see it. So I think you’re quite right. It’s a wonderful and very earthy way to experience living. It’s funny because people have said to me, “Oh, the movie has a very acoustic feel, it’s like a ’50s movie — people are yelling out of windows across the way.” I’m thinking, I went home to see my dad who lives in the same house, and he opens the window and says, “Seymour, Seymour!” He’s yelling down the street to a neighbor, life hasn’t changed. It’s changed for a bunch of people who live in Manhattan and make $700,000 a year or whatever, but that’s not most people. So yes, I think there’s a very earthy thing about living in New York, which is true in some metropolises, but certainly not this one obviously. Los Angeles is a very different culture.
Q: But not even just New York vs. L.A. — a suburb in middle America is still isolated in the way people meet.
JG: Oh, I meant New York as opposed to anywhere else. Obviously if you’re living in a suburb in Winesburg, Ohio, you know, obviously life is a very strange and different experience. I think the automobile all of a sudden kind of becomes a major factor [in life and social interaction], and where I live I don’t even have sidewalks. I live up Laurel Canyon, and if I want to walk with my son I have to drive to the park, which is so insane to me.
Q: You should live in Little Armenia where I live, you can walk around everywhere.
JG: I like Little Armenia. I love Marousch. Have you ever been to Marousch? I love Marousch. My wife doesn’t like Marousch because I reek of garlic for seven years after eating it, but it’s great.
Q: Does it inform you aesthetically too? Obviously, I mean there’s probably some New York films that you love…
JG: Oh I love New York movies, but New York movies inform my aesthetic less. I try not to read very much about myself, for a variety of reasons — not least of which is I always come off sounding like an idiot, as my own fault — but what little I’ve sort of come across they usually [refer to] Coppola, Lumet, Scorsese [in describing my work]. I love Coppola, and he and Scorsese are obviously formative in the movies I love, but I think about them, consciously anyway, much less than you might think. I mean, what I really am in love with is trying to reproduce the kind of expressive direct emotions of ’50s movies from Europe, particularly Italy, which is really what I love. So I don’t know how much it’s informed by aesthetic. Certainly copying from reality, my father opening the window and going “Seymour!” calling down the street, that of course informs what you do, but I think in terms of the New York movies, which I do love, consciously they don’t inform them as much as I guess people have said.
Q: Joaquin’s character is also a photographer in the movie, too.
JG: Well, he is [an aspirant] photographer. That’s sort of a quasi-autobiographical thing. I mean, it’s close to painting, it’s close to cinema. I had wanted someone who had some measure of art
istic dream, which I thought was important.
Q: So you’ve worked with Joaquin in three movies. What was your reaction when he announced his retirement?
JG: I was befuddled. I mean… look, he’s been doing it for much longer than most people think. He’s been acting literally for 30 years, so at a certain point you have to respect entirely the person’s wishes, but for totally selfish reasons I was very disappointed. He and I get along very well together on the set. Actually, I shouldn’t say that because we fight a lot, but in a good way. We have a wonderful working relationship, and he and I have very similar tastes so it’s very upsetting. You don’t really find that that often where you feel totally sympathetic and empathetic with another actor, so if he’s quitting that bums me out a lot. I also think he’s just really great. The world’s not filled with actors who are wonderful so, for the sake of movies, I hope he’s lying.
Q: Did you get a sense from him while you were shooting that he was kind of burned out on acting?
JG: I did, at that end. People don’t realize. It sounds like you’ve heard this before, [about] people like Daniel Day-Lewis and other actors who get so into character that they begin to disappear as people, and Joaquin is really one of those guys. I mean he does a tremendous amount of work. I would come to set at 6:00 a.m., and the actor doesn’t have to be there until 9, and Joaquin would be there sitting on set in the corner with tears rolling down his cheeks. And I’d say, “What’s the matter?” And he say, “No, I’m preparing for the day.” And at the end of the shoot I remember sort of saying, “What kind of thing do you want to explore next?” And he just said, “Man, I’m tired. I don’t know. I don’t know if I want to do it anymore. I’m tired of it. I can’t take it.”
Q: And then your film goes down in history as his last.
JG: Yeah, but then it’s like being Woody Allen in Manhattan, where Meryl Streep then has become, like, a lesbian. You’re like the person who made Meryl Streep go away from being heterosexual.
Q: Are you bothered at all by the fact that easily 80 percent of the press so far for this movie has been about Joaquin’s retirement, his hip-hop career and, oh yeah, then that he’s also in a movie called Two Lovers?
JG: It doesn’t bother me really because… I hope this doesn’t offend you guys, because I do have a real awareness of how important press is for a movie, but this is my fourth movie, and at a certain point you realize that the life of the film is a marathon and not a sprint. What’s written today about a movie is not really the story of the movie. I mean, you don’t know how much money — maybe you do, I would be very impressed if you did — how much money Chinatown grossed or something, or what the original reviews are for Klute. At a certain point all that stuff goes away and if I focused [only] on that aspect I would be very depressed. Being totally candid, on my first two movies I would read the clippings that the publicist would send, and I would get ultimately very thrilled and incredibly depressed when people said the movie sucks or whatever. Or that they say it’s about this when you meant it to be about that or whatever. At a certain point it gets very wearying, but then what you find is it’s not really ultimately what it is in the end. So with Joaquin’s, as my mother would have called it years ago, mishegoss, I have to respect whatever it is that he wants to do, and I must just say the film is what it wanted to be. It doesn’t mean that I think I’m super deluxe genius or that it’s perfect or anything. I just mean that it’s what I wanted to make. And at a certain point you can’t be unhappy about that. If the film is what it wants to be then in a way I’m much more at peace now than I’ve ever been. So I’ve tried to be a little bit zen about it, and after The Yards, We Own the Night and this, I haven’t read any reviews or press or anything. I try to ward myself off. I hope that answers your question.
Q: Well, but in the short term, and for the careers of everyone involved, it’s obviously better if the movie makes more money. So do you think that all this mishegoss, as you say, has helped bring more attention to Two Lovers, or is it the wrong kind of attention?
JG: I don’t know. I don’t know. I think it’s probably brought more attention. It’s a small film, you know? And it doesn’t have a print and advertising budget that Spider-Man 3 does, or whatever. So any attention it can get is fine. I know that’s not why he’s doing it. And would I be thrilled if the attention were all about the film? Sure, that would be wonderful, but whatever it can get is great and there are a whole host of other small wonderful movies that don’t get half the attention.
Q: Well let me just ask you one more thing along these lines, because obviously Joaquin raps a bit in the movie. So did he come to you with this idea and say this is something that I want to go into long-term, or was this just a random improv?
JG: No, that was an improv thing. Well, sort of improv. We talked about it before shooting. In the character of Leonard, we had wanted not the traditional nerd, we had wanted a person who actually was appealing and probably 10 to 12 years before might have been considered a hip dude. There was a certain element of his that might have been cool in school, but that he had lost that and heartbreak had kind of ruined him in a way. And that’s based on a person that I know, actually. So we were trying to come up with ways (to convey that), and he says, “I had a crew, I had a crew. This is what we used to do.” And then the break-dance routine that he does in the club, which is sort of kind of good but not great. It’s sort of imperfect and it’s simultaneously embarrassing, but you can see why the girls might like it. We did this in the spirit of a person who used to be happening but is now damaged. So whether he used that as a springboard for his current escapade, I have no idea. What I can say is that it felt authentic to that character.
Q: Did he just make up the rhyme off the top of his head or…?
JG: We worked on it a little bit. He sort of made it up and then we….there’s literally about 20 minutes of film on that and so I chose what I felt was best, [when he says] “I’ll blow up your face like Louis Armstrong” — like, totally absurd! So I picked and chose what I liked best about it.
Q: And now you’re also attached to a film called The Legend of Z?
JG: Oh, The Lost City of Z. Yeah, yeah, yeah. With Brad Pitt [attached], yeah. It’s totally different from anything I’ve done. It’s of unbelievable ambition, and I love Brad for that reason — he does not lack for ambition. He had sent me the article from The New Yorker by a guy named David Graham, about a guy named Percy Fawcett who was sent to South America to. The history of the mapping of the world is recent history — the last hundred years or so, or at least the accurate map
ping of the world obviously. So, the British had sent this man down to South America to mediate a border dispute between Bolivia and Brazil because the rubber trade was huge back then, 1905 to 1906, because of B.F. Goodrich and the advent of the automobile. So the borders were not clearly delineated and they needed somebody, a third party, to chart the borders correctly so that Bolivia and Brazil wouldn’t argue anymore about who had what. So he went down there and rather quickly lost his appetite for mapping, which he did with wonderful success. But he quickly became aware of the possible existence of El Dorado, the city of gold, and a lost civilization in the jungle. And he became obsessed with archeological issues, and to be direct about it went quite mad. The story is quite sprawling. He went back to fight in World War I, where he was injured in the Battle of the Somme. Basically he was attacked with chlorine gas and eventually went back to the Amazon and brought his son with him to finish the exploration and find this lost city. They disappeared. They were never seen again. It’s a fantastic story. I mean, it’s unbelievable. And I think it has the potential to be something really quite powerful. I’m about three-fourths of the way through the fist draft of the script now and I’m going to give it to Brad when I’m done, in probably about another two months I’d say.
Q: When Brad came to you, did you have to kind of stop and figure out what you visually could bring to it because it’s so different from what you’ve done previously?
JG: I didn’t, because the story meant a lot to me. I’m very interested in history and I’m very interested in an economic approach to history… I don’t want to say Marxist because obviously Marxism is absurd as a way to organize the world. It’s ridiculous. But in the way of looking at the world as a form as historical analysis, it bears some scrutiny. I mean, it’s certainly interesting. And the idea itself of civilization, the civilized world, is almost ridiculous, [as well as] the idea that everyone had called the indigenous population — I almost don’t want to use the word Indian because of what that really means — of the Amazon savages. Well, they’re basically savages because the Spanish and the English and everybody else went down there and essentially forced them into slave trade and treated them horribly. So when they saw a white man they quite reasonably had a violent response. It’s self-preservation. And the only time that this man really got injured was in the Battle of the Somme. I don’t know if you know about this. It’s literally like the end of the civilized world. It’s the thing that made the Geneva Convention, because the British had brought two regiments of Indian troops from India on horseback, and they would fit gas masks on the heads of the horses to gallop out of the trenches and get machine-gunned. It was insanity! So what interested me was not even the visual aspect at first. What interested me entirely was a narrative idea about a person who was on a certain quest about a lost civilization fueled, at least in part, with his disappointment about what his civilization had produced — a certain obsession with class distinction anyway. So I loved the story. The story itself was great, and the visual aspect of it, that comes for me second or even third. It’s not the primary thing I think about — which is maybe a flaw, I don’t know. What I think about initially — because I feel like if you want to be a narrative filmmaker, which is my dream — is the narrative muscle needs to be engaged first, the storytelling. I think that story is a wonderful and lost art. In fact, somebody told me last night that MIT was literally creating a program to teach story because they thought respect for story had become degraded, which I found really interesting and weird. “I’m majoring in story.” What does that mean? But story is transformative and quite beautiful and so the story itself is what drove me, and kind of the Oepedial, bizarre twist that he brought his 18-year-old son with him in the end. And they were never seen again.
Q: It sounds like you’re thinking about a real-world history approach.
JG: That’s what I’m trying to do. You know, Indiana Jones was based him. Of course it’s a totally different, Republic, B-serial approach to the character, and doesn’t bear any resemblance finally, but that’s who he sort of was — the basis for Indiana Jones. And the stuff in the book is unbelievable — like falling off a raft and starting to get eaten by piranhas. And he literally was the first person in western civilization to discover the Anaconda. They didn’t believe him. He said, “I saw a 30-foot snake that was eating deer.” People thought he was making it up.
Q: Sounds a bit like Herzog…
JG: The Wrath of God, yeah. You know wandering through the desert, or the jungle, and all of a sudden hearing opera and thinking you’ve gone mad, and guess what — you’ve reached the clearing and there’s a fucking opera house in the middle of the jungle that the Portuguese have built 150 years before. I mean, it’s madness but it’s great. Aguirre is a masterpiece I think, and I’m going to try my hardest not to rip it off. It is really hard because it is a masterpiece. And I don’t think I will rip it off because it involves a lot of European history as well in a way that is not really connected to Aguirre. Aguirre is, in its enclosed, oneric, beautiful way, quite different. I mean, a big set piece in this movie about two-thirds of the way through will be the Battle of the Somme, which I’m hoping I can do in a way that other people have not. I don’t know, I’ve been doing research on it. It’s just like hell on Earth. It’s awful.
Q: So I assume Brad will be disfigured for part of this film too, right?
JG: No, he was not disfigured. What happened was he was a crazy person. He was put in charge of 700 men and the generals came, and he was almost like Forrest Gump — Winston Churchill he came in contact with, and Archduke Ferdinand he was in contact with in Sri Lanka. Percy Fawcett was one of those guys who was always connected somehow to major figures. Churchill came down to the trenches and said, “A major problem — all of you have your hands in your pockets, and as soldiers you should be behaving for the king.” And everybody’s like, “What are you talking about? We’re getting mustard gas dumped on us.” So anyway, Percy finally was ordered not to try to take a particular territory. He said, “Fuck it, I’m going to be brave,” and he led these 700 guys into battle, but he wasn’t directly, physically injured except that he inhaled chlorine gas, which scarred his lungs. And then he began to have this horrible cough which became progressively worse.
Two Lovers opens February 13. For an interview with Joaquin Phoenix, click here. For an interview with Vinessa Shaw, click here.
2008 Oscar Nominated Animated Shorts
Wall▪E eventually struck out in its bid to match 1991’s Beauty and the Beast as the only animated film to ever score a Best Picture Academy Award nomination, but its widespread critical praise helped underscore the notion — once somewhat radical, now more firmly rooted — that animation is a medium, and not a genre unto itself. More proof comes courtesy of this year’s slate of nominees for Best Animated Short Film.
Running only three minutes, French entry Oktapodi is the shortest nominated film, and it’s also the slightest — a case of colorful but empty style masquerading as entertainment. The story finds two octopi fighting for their lives in an out-of-water, air-quote comical escape/rescue mission through the streets of a small Greek village. Nothing about this short sequence makes much sense, and those inclined to give it a good-natured, shrugging pass need only be reminded of Finding Nemo‘s thrilling, funny aquarium escape scene, which didn’t ignore basic biological facts about its subjects, but instead incorporated them into the story.
House of Small Cubes, Japanese writer-director Kunio Kato’s 12-minute effort, is an elegiac offering
about an old man battling a rising tide to save his house; there’s a
children’s-storybook-come-to-life quality to the animation, and it draws a viewer in slowly. Near wordless nine-minute British entry This Way Up, a slice of funeral slapstick from Adam Foulkes and Alan Smith in which two morgue attendants try to deliver a coffin to rest, is gorgeously sketched, but, like Oktapodi, a bit hollow, narratively.
The theatrical pre-show entertainment to Wall▪E, and part of its DVD celebration as well, Disney/Pixar’s five-minute Presto (above) is about a turn-of-the-century magician who, after failing to feed his rabbit, enters into a wild on-stage game of one-upsmanship with said animal. Writer-director Doug Sweetland’s is the crown jewel of the nominated flicks, a kinetic, funny little farce that also manages to slip in a few touching grace notes about the mutual dependence of its characters. Easily the second-best entry is Lavatory Lovestory, a spare, mostly black-and-white, 10-minute Russian film from writer-director Konstantin Bronzit about a lonely female toilet attendant who attempts to uncover the identity of her secret admirer. Formally, it’s nothing like Peanuts, but its mixture of externalized daydream and (swallowed, in this case) interior monologue recalls Charles Schulz’s skill at mixing the wry and the wistful. A tender score helps matters, too.
Many big cities are hosting theatrical exhibitions of the films, but look for them down the line, collected, on DVD, if they don’t make it to your area in the coming weeks. The animated program includes five more “commended” bonus shorts from Marc Crase, Bill Plympton, Matthew Walker and Jeremy Clapin not screened for review, hence its listed running time below. For a review of the 2008 Oscar live action short film nominees, click here. (Shorts International/Magnolia, unrated, 88 minutes)
2008 Oscar Nominated Live Action Shorts
The Academy Awards on February 22 offer up all sorts of major league intrigue, but the undercard is pretty compelling too, at least for those who’ve seen the 10 short-form (five live action, five animation) Oscar nominees. As a kid I always wondered why these didn’t road-show, and while the truth is they’re too arty to make it worth a distributor’s while in broad fashion, if you live in a big city there’s a decent chance you’ll be able to catch them this month. Otherwise, make yourself a Netflix note.
Director Reto Caffi’s On the Line, a joint Swiss/German entry that runs around half an hour, is about department store security guard, Rolf (Roeland Wiesnekker) who’s secretly infatuated with Sarah (Catherine Janke), a clerk in the store’s bookshop. When he witnesses who he presumes to be a love rival being attacked on a train, he abandons him — a decision that carries with it devastating consequences. The premise is very Brian De Palma, but the acting here is restrained and beautiful, and the melancholic whole conjures up a slightly sunnier Michael Haneke, maybe cross-pollinated with late ’90s-era James Mangold.
Also fairly long-form, Denmark’s The Pig, scripted by Anders August and Dorte Hogh and directed by the latter, is a sublime treat. When Asbjorn Jensen (Henning Moritzen) is admitted to the hospital for surgery (“in the butt,” as he bluntly tells the nurse), and held over so that some additional tests might be run to determine whether he has cancer, he takes comfort from an unusual source — a whimsical painting of a pig. When it’s removed by the Muslim family of his new roommate — who finds the image offensive — Asbjorn wigs out, demanding its return. His lawyer daughter gets involved, and there’s a wheel-spinning stalemate. It’s a funny concept, rendered in a very rooted, humanistic yet amusing fashion.
French entry Manon on the Asphalt, from writer-directors Elizabeth Marre and Olivier Pont, is a 15-minute tale of subjective remembrance — think of it very loosely as a disciple of The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, though vaccumed free of bold-stroke visual style — told from the point-of-view of a girl struck by a car while riding home on her bicycle. Eleven-minute Irish entry New Boy, meanwhile, from writer-director Steph Green, is based on a Roddy Doyle short story. In it, Joseph (Olutunji Ebun-Cole, above), a young African immigrant, struggles to find a place for himself during his first day at a parochial school, as flashbacks make clear a distressing classroom past in his homeland.
The most ploddingly obvious of the bunch, and the only real misfire, is Germany’s 14-minute Toyland, from director Jochen Alexander Freydank. Of course, since it’s about the Holocaust (a mother tries to convince her young son that their Jewish neighbors, and his piano teacher, are going on a journey to “Toyland,” which then complicates things, because of course he wants to go too), it stands as good a chance as anything here — and probably much better — of winning. It’s exquisitely costumed and framed, no doubt, but the “how to save a life” story is a wan Schindler’s List rip-off. I won’t pretend to be a handicapping genius with respect to the “mini” Oscars, but I’d rate The Pig and On the Line tied as top-shelf keepers, New Boy a strong second and respectable tone poem Manon on the Asphalt third of the bunch. If Toyland wins, it’s only because of its thematic focus, and it could signal a big evening for The Reader. For a review of the 2008 Oscar animated short film nominees, meanwhile, click here. (Shorts International/Magnolia, unrated, 94 minutes)
Vinessa Shaw on Two Lovers, Joaquin Phoenix
On Tuesday I was part of a small roundtable group of journalists who chatted with Vinessa Shaw (pictured below in Garden Party) about Two Lovers, in which she stars opposite Joaquin Phoenix and Gwyneth Paltrow. A Brooklyn-set drama about Leonard, a thirtysomething, live-at-home, bi-polar wallflower who finds himself torn between two women, neither of whom may ultimately be right for him, writer-director James Gray‘s movie marks the third collaboration between filmmaker and male star, but is currently getting lots of pub as Phoenix’s last film, now that he’s announced a retirement from acting, and the launch of a rap career. Shaw, who plays Sandra, a sweet-natured woman whose father might be buying the dry-cleaning business of Leonard’s pop, talks about her work with Phoenix, as well as the film as a whole. The conversation is excerpted below, with a few slight story spoilers when the conversation dips into the movie most specifically:
Question: Have you ever had anyone, especially parents, try to set you up with anyone?
Vinessa Shaw: No, I never have. I think I’ve always made my own choices, but at the same time there’s always some date that end up going on to please someone else. But I’m not very good at dating. I’m very decisive. If I like someone then they’re my boyfriend, it’s pretty straightforward.
Q: What was it like filming on location in New York?
VS: I think New York is perfect for this film because of the intimacy between characters, and I really feel we couldn’t have done it anywhere else. Plus, James is from New York and has a special place in his heart for the city and the surrounding burroughs. I feel like if we used L.A. for New York it wouldn’t have been the same, especially in his heart.
Q: Which leads to part two — did James take you guys out [to specific places] to get everyone ready?
VS: No. (laughs) I think he was there with his family, living in Tribeca, and was really focusing on the work we had to do. And the film went [off] pretty fast after we got all the actors together for each character, we just started filming. So I think he just went scouting and that was it. You kind of had to create in your mind what the scenarios would be for each character, and where their families lived and the specificity of it.
Q: Why wouldn’t this movie be the same if it was set in L.A.?
VS: As we know, so many romantic movies are set in New York, and I think the city itself romances people’s hearts. I think it can be a very lonely city and also a very comforting city depending on how happy or miserable you are. So I think we see both sides of that, and especially for my character, being from Brighton Beach, it’s a very homey kind of familial neighborhood, contrasted to the awe of New York City, which James does so well when Leonard goes into [Manhattan] and there’s that beautiful, serenading music. The city can be very intoxicating in that way, and that’s what’s happening to him with Michelle. He’s being intoxicated by her mysterious ways.
Q: The love scenes in this film are much more realistic than we see in many movies. Were there any differences in other movie love scenes?
VS: (laughs) I think all movie love scenes are hard, because you can’t truly be as intimate as you would be with anyone you’re truly with, and everyone’s watching you. But I think especially for the love scene between [Sandra and Leonard], it’s in his parent’s house, and James really wanted it to be messy — not just shooting on my face and then his face. I think you got the reality of the characters. Even in the end, when we’re post-coital, Sandra’s holding him instead of him holding her. It’s very much the nature of their characters, so I think he really got the correct mood of the scene — very passionate, but still kind of imbalanced in how she essentially views their relationship.
Q: Joaquin and James have worked together a lot — did you notice a shorthand between them?
VS: For sure. I went in, and the first day I had to do the scene in the café, and it’s the first day that I’ve even met Joaquin and was supposed to be doing the actual climax of our characters’ relationship, having dated for a few months, and with things going a little bumpy. And so going into Joaquin’s trailer, with James there, it was very much like they already knew what was going on and I had to catch up a little. But it’s really nice, it’s a very brotherly kind of care that they have for each other, so in that sense, even though I didn’t know the terminology or shorthand that they were using, I still caught up to it because of their care for each other, and I was welcomed into that circle.
Q: Some filmmakers do a lot of takes — how was it on this film?
VS: James was running the show, and he really wanted us to run the gamut of all the possibilities that the characters would go through. He wanted my character, especially, for instance, the scene in the café, he ran it a couple times with me not saying anything, and then a couple times with a full-out argument. And so what you get on film is something in between. So I think he just wants to play a lot. And that would drive me crazy sometimes, because I didn’t know where we were going and what would be on screen, but it was exciting nonetheless.
Q: I’d be interested in your take on Sandra, because she’s willing to take a lot of absence from Leonard, she’s willing to accept him not showing up to the birthday party, or showing up [late] to the New Year’s Eve party. Who is she — is she a sad person, or is she just so in love with him that she [acts this way]?
VS: I think that her life, from what I could see, was very straightforward, and I think perhaps she’s been in many relationships where she’s been set up with people — guys that are very safe and stable, and probably have good futures, a good doctor or something. [Sandra], I think, has an adventurous streak in her, even though she’s not crazy like Michelle. In her perspective, she has this rebellious side, [wanting] somebody who’s more dangerous and unpredictable. I think she seeks that out in [Leonard]. She wants to be the one who can do something or help someone. She works at Pfizer in the city, so she’s definitely a caretaker in nature, but I think she maybe has too much faith in Leonard, and really feels his potential is something she could seek out, and he could be someone in the future who is really ready for her. But right now she doesn’t see that. Maybe she’s way more patient than any woman could ever be in seeing what exists for him in the future, so she doesn’t make a stink about him [missing the parties]. Either that or she’s completely in love, and blinded by that, I don’t know. I kind of decided to have her be someone who’s just simple, and sees his potential, and lives in that moment of potentiality rather than what’s going on.
Q: There’s an ambiguity at the end of the film. Do you think they have a chance at working out?
VS: I think it’s a mystery, for me. I hope that they work out. You can tell that he’s stepping into the bright future that he wants to live, but you never know. She could just as easily get fed up if he doesn’t reach the place that she wants him to be. So I hope the best for them.
Q: You’re saying it would be fine for them until she found out about the ring (a gif
t originally purchased for Michelle), and then the shit would hit the fan.
VS: Maybe, maybe. But even so, she’s an extremely understanding woman — more than any of us could be — and she’s extremely compassionate. I think that perhaps she’s been through a lot in her past, to the point where nothing phases her. Maybe that’s why they do have hope in the end, or there is at least a possibility of them succeeding.
Q: Are you part of this documentary Casey Affleck is doing about Joaquin?
VS: No, no.
Q: What do you think about [his announced retirement], and the hip hop career?
VS: You know, I hope he enjoys what he’s doing. I think that he’s a fantastic actor, and I hope that whatever he does makes him happy. I’m sure that whatever Joaquin chooses to do will bring success in his life, because he’s obviously very talented.
Q: Are you bummed that he’s quitting acting?
VS: Yeah, I would love to work with him again, but such is life. People have to do what they want to do.
Q: When getting involved with this project, was it hearing that Joaquin and James were making another movie that made you want to get involved, or were you sent the script?
VS: Well, I had been given the script and apparently James had seen 3:10 to Yuma, the movie I did with Russell Crowe, and was at the premiere. It’s so funny, because I realized that I’d seen him there, kind of staring at me. A few days, maybe even less than a week later I got the script and I heard that Joaquin and Gwyneth were attached. I loved the script, and felt like it was so real, and that the story unfolded so naturally, and that he was a great writer. I just thought, “Why not?”
Q: I found the film interesting because with respect to your character it’s a portrait of a woman who’s desperately loving someone who’s maybe wrong for her. And you don’t usually see that. She’s complicated, she’s not just a doormat.
VS: The thing I responded to the most was that she’s so honest. The exchange between her and Leonard was so beautiful, because it was real and awkward and kind of dorky. It was kind of sweet; they didn’t have everything together, and all the cool lines to say to hit on each other. So I felt it was sweet, and I think she really brings out his sweetness. I love when he has opera playing in his house, and she says she’s never been to the opera, but she’s been to The Nutcracker. She’s a very simple girl — never had more than seeing The Nutcracker. And I’m sure there’s not any other ballet that she’s seen. So I felt immediate compassion when I read her character, because I felt that she’s someone who’s pure in her love. And so she’s not manipulative, and doesn’t have a mean bone in her body. That’s different than being a doormat. It’s pure kindness and pure love. She’s not seeking anything in return. And I think you become a doormat when you start thinking that you don’t deserve the love you receive. She’s just different, she just knows that Leonard will love her and come around and become the kind of person that she knows he can be. It was a different kind of character, because she’s so warm and kind and has nothing but respect for him and her family. She’s just a good girl.
Q: Did you have to audition with James?
VS: It was one of those highly unusual circumstances in Hollywood, where it was just a meeting and an offer. I had not auditioned for him, he was very confident based on what he saw in 3:10 to Yuma, and Donna Gigliotti, who produced the film, said she saw it a few weeks earlier and told him, “I found your girl.” And he went and saw the movie and said that was it. So it was kind of fate that way.
Q: Have you gotten other gigs from other roles?
VS: Once before, and it’s funny because they’re friends. James is friends with Kathryn Bigelow, and she saw Eyes Wide Shut and cast me in Weight of Water based on just a meeting.
Q: Do you have anything coming up? Of those rumored projects, do you have something starting in March?
VS: There are things in the mix, but there’s so much that the business is suffering right now, but I think there will be something very soon. Most of the things that I’ve been involved in [have just had issues] with financing and stuff like that. (laughs) Hopefully that stuff will go [soon], hopefully for all of us.
Q: In the meantime, what do you do, take on a play or just enjoy the nice time off?
VS: I’m very active, I’m not just an actor. I have other things going on. I’m a Buddhist and active in my Buddhist’s Association, and I’m actually a National Young Women’s representative for the organization, so I travel a lot helping young women who are practicing Buddhism. And I have my family, and this is a wonderful time to have some [free] time. But at the same time, I’m definitely ready to go to work again as well. I’m going to be honest.
Q: Do you consider it to be a position of honor to be Joaquin’s potential final leading lady?
VS: Of course! Of course. And he’s very fantastic in this movie. If it really is the last role that he does, and he doesn’t come back for sure, then it’s a great one, because he’s so different than any of the characters that he’s played before. He’s so sweet, and he’s kind of funny in this too, very funny and charming. I think these are things that we haven’t seen from Joaquin Phoenix before.
Q: Have you tried to take him aside and say, “You can’t be serious!”?
VS: (laughs) I haven’t really, because I haven’t seen him since he decided to [retire], so… yeah.
Q: Wrapping up, you talked about being cast in this movie off of a meeting, but are auditions something you feel a level of comfort and ease with, given your theatrical background?
VS: Yes, I have ease and comfort because I’ve been doing it a long time, but auditioning is never an easy thing — I think you’re always feeling judged and feeling like you have to prove something. It’s such an awkward, strange thing that was concocted, to have auditions. Back in the old days you’d just have a screen test and they’d say, “Oh, you seem natural in front of the camera,” and you’d just go do 10 pictures for Paramount or whatever. So this auditioning process is very new to the business, and I think a lot of people can find reasons to not like your performance because of the specificity of that room at that time, and the takes that you do. But I’ve learned to live with it, like every other actor, and it’s still fun, because you get to say that you’ve worked that way, when you go on an audition.
Q: Do you have any memorable worst ones?
VS: Oh God… I don’t remember, probably thankfully. I just remember being sick on some of them. I auditioned for Moulin Rouge and had a fever and everything, and was trying to sing. I just remember being loopy. But nothing very bad, to the point where [I’ve been] completely embarrassed.
Christian Bale Now Shares Something with Homer Simpson
It was inevitable, really — the Christian Bale soundboard, taken from the recently leaked audio of his expletive-laden tirade against cinematographer Shane Hurlbut on the set of Terminator Salvation last summer.
This Week’s Reviews, Reset
Happy Birthday, Alice Eve
It’s a happy 27th birthday to Alice Eve (pictured here, left, with Rebecca Hall), whom plenty of big city cinephiles will be Google-searching after the February 27 opening of writer-director Wayne Kramer’s labyrinthine Crossing Over, because she’s topless a good bit and gets sexed by Ray Liotta’s sleazeball immigration visa rubber-stamper. Starter for 10, opposite James McAvoy, was Eve’s big break-through (if the 2007 film can be called that), but it’s funny, because to me she’s first and foremost a dead ringer for a younger version of BBC America’s Katty Kay.
What Does Jason Statham Think of Uwe Boll?
Just as a sort of curveball question to inject some levity, (correctly) not figuring to get much of a straight answer, I wrist-flicked the following query at Jason Statham during an interview last fall: “Hey, is Uwe Boll insane?” Statham’s reply, after a laugh: “I just remember an enjoyable time up there in Canada [during the production of In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale]. I was working with Ray Liotta, and I was very happy to share a spaghetti bolognese with him. Uwe’s actually really quite a nice guy, and a smart guy, so I have nothing but good things to say about him.” And now I’m sharing all this with you. Ahh, circle of life, don’tcha know…
Retro-Sexploitation Flick Viva Nets March Cinefamily Screening
It’s still a ways off, but writer-director Anna Biller’s scrupulously fashion-detailed 2007 retro-sexploitation camp-fest Viva screens March 3 at 8 p.m. at the Silent Movie Theatre (611 N. Fairfax Avenue in Los Angeles), as part of Cinefamily’s programming. Fab Magazine describes the movie thusly: “With a plot stripped from a 1969 letter to Penthouse, Viva tells the story of Barbi (Biller again), a naïve housewife who sets out to discover the seedy underbelly of the sexual revolution. With her best friend Sheila (Bridget Brno) in tow, she encounters everything from prowling cougars, grandmotherly brothel madams and lesbian supermodels to full-blown orgies. Toss in a gay hairdresser, a funk-gasmic soundtrack and some surreal animated and musical sequences and you’ve got one smoking hot slice of nouveau cult cinema. Biller’s truly amazing accomplishment in Viva comes courtesy of her uncannily authentic design. It doesn’t emulate the spirit of those swinging times, it’s possessed by them. Just one whiff of the cheap cologne, one glance at the rugged polyester, and you’ll have to submit to this killer escapade.”
Multi-hyphenate Biller will be at the Cinefamily event for an in-person, post-screening Q&A session; tickets are $12. For more information on the movie, click here; to check out its trailer, click here. For Cinefamily’s February calendar, meanwhile, click here.
Joaquin Phoenix Talks About Quitting Acting, Taking Up Rap
So Joaquin Phoenix has given up acting for a rap career, or so he insists. Others are saying it’s a hoax, part of some Borat-style performance piece — especially since brother-in-law Casey Affleck is filming a documentary on the transition. I was among a small group of journalists that Phoenix sat down with yesterday in Los Angeles. I’ll soon have some separate, break-out thoughts on the whole afternoon (as well as his alleged big screen swan song, Two Lovers), but what follows is a near-complete transcript of the Q&A:
Question: So is the this the last time we’re gonna see you like this, in this setting? How does it feel?
Joaquin Phoenix: Great. Yeah, it ain’t nothing personal. No, but honestly, today I was getting dressed for hours, prepping, and I was just really satisfied that I wasn’t gonna have to do this again.
Q: But [director James Gray] was saying that you actually were talking to him little bit towards the end of making [Two Lovers] about kind of being a little bit burned out, and that you weren’t sure what you wanted to do next.
JP: Right.
Q: So did [those feelings] start while you were making this film, or had you thought about changing careers for a while?
JP: Well, I think that I’ve threatened myself with quitting after every movie. But I think everybody does that, right? I mean, it’s something that I’ve thought about for a long time. And I’ve been working on my music, doing all sorts of different kinds of music and stuff and, I don’t know, in some ways I kind of felt like like I needed to make a statement [about] quitting [acting] really for myself. In some ways I kind of regret it, because I didn’t realize it was going to be such a big deal. I thought nobody would give a fuck, really, to be frank. And I was pretty surprised. I guess no one does except for maybe like a couple people that are blogging or whatever. But I felt that I had to do something extreme to get out of it, because it’s really hard for me to go into music. Because the first thing anyone says is Johnny Cash, you know what I mean? So I really had to do something extreme to get away from that.
Q: You’ve done a few shows now, so how do you feel the hip hop career is going so far?
JP: Uh, terrible. No it’s kind of weird. I haven’t done a bunch of shows, I did a lot of freestyling around the studio and I’ve gone to some small places, and I guess some people there filmed it and shit and put it out there. It was really nerve-wracking, because there’s literally people there heckling you, and saying Johnny Cash and saying this stuff. So it was really difficult. I got really nervous. But the show in Las Vegas I think was a lot better than what’s been said because of how it appears in the video. But it’s still quite a process, like with mic control and stuff, and I have to stay I’m not really there yet, you know what I mean? I realized that, because I’ve watched footage that we shot and I saw all the times when I had the mic away from my mouth that I didn’t realize, you know? And that was probably from Walk the Line, where I was doing the playback and shit, so you could get away from the mic it didn’t matter. But I just figure put yourself out there, crash, and then you rebuild yourself. You kind of find your way into it. I found out like all these hip hop dudes work with like vocal coaches, they do training, they do the whole thing, and I never knew that. I didn’t want to hire a bunch of people, I didn’t want to just start out and hire a produce and get someone to write stuff for me and do all that. I really wanted to do it myself and feel what it was like. I have I guess some celebrity or whatever, so [it’s not like] people wouldn’t really be aware of me until after some right time. Just the first thing I do gets thrust into the spotlight. And I knew that, but I just said fuck it, you know?
Q: You talk about wanting to do something different than the Johnny Cash thing. Was hip hop something you grew up with? I think you even do some break-dancing in the movie.
JP: Yeah, the break-dancing, that’s actually James. No,just kidding. Actually, the thing is, I don’t think there’s many people my age that didn’t grow up listening to hip hop. When I was 15 and 16, that was it for me. I loved hip hop. The first stuff I heard was Public Enemy, and I couldn’t believe it, it was amazing. I’ve always loved hip hop.
Q: So for you is it strictly the old school stuff, or do you like stuff now like Kanye West?
JP: I’m not that familiar with some new stuff, I couldn’t believe some of the differences. You know what’s amazing also is the mastering that they do know. I was listening to B.I.G’s “Juicy,” and I remember that seemed like it was the most crisp pop sound when it came out. There was an underground, New York gritty Wu-Tang kind of sound, and then there came like this real pop sound, and then I put on T.I. and Young Jeezy and shit and then I went back to “Juicy,” I couldn’t believe the difference. It’s unbelievable, the production now. It’s overproduced absolutely.
Q: You talk about crashing into this hip hop career; in one of these YouTube videos we see you take quite a spill off the stage. What happened there?
JP: I didn’t fucking fall. What happened is… first of all, it’s not a stage, it’s about this wide (indicating four feet), you’re up on this little platform, there’s fucking lights everywhere right, in your eyes, flashing at you like that, and everything is dark. And I literally just went to step off the thing and misjudged and slipped down. I wasn’t fucked up. I jumped down and I literally jumped back up without harm and said I’m fine. But, honestly, I was so nervous that I don’t know, it’s all kind of a blur. I don’t feel like I really was aware of what was happening until I was, like, halfway through the second song.
Q: You’re a very private person, but you’re being followed today by a camera crew. Why did you agree to this, and to be so public with everything?
JP: Well, we don’t necessarily know it’s gonna be public. I mean, I’m just doing something for myself. I mean, that’s my friend for fuck sake, you know what I mean? So it’s not like I hired this professional doc crew to follow what I’m doing.
Q: What would say to the people who are saying this is all bogus?
JP: I would say the people who said that it’s a hoax are clearly somebody who is an old friend, or somebody that I worked with on music. You know, I’ve worked with a lot of people on music in the past, and oftentimes those things don’t work out, and sometimes you have some bad blood between people. And that’s where I imagine it comes from, that’s all that I know it is. I realize that part of it might seem ridiculous to other people, but I can’t concern myself with that. I’m not gonna be worried about what people think that my life is. What people think has never affected my decisions, and I’m not gonna let that start now.
Q: Why have you decided acting is no longer for you? Doesn’t rapping make you more vulnerable, because you’re out there by yourself?
JP: I don’t care, but my dissatisfaction with acting has nothing to do with being uncomfortable or vulnerable, or feeling like people are gonna criticize me. That’s not the problem.
Q: What is the problem?
JP: I don’t think there is a problem. I
just don’t feel challenged by acting anymore. I don’t enjoy the process anymore, you know? I’ve enjoyed it very much at times, I’m very thankful for the people that I’ve had the opportunity to work with. I’ve had a good life, it’s been amazing, I’m not complaining, it’s not like acting just ruined me so I have to leave. It’s not that. I’m just done with it.
Q: One a scale of 1 to 100, are you 100 percent sure you’ll never act again?
JP: Yeah.
Q: Two Lovers is quite a good performance to end on. Are you able to see or judge that for yourself?
JP: I don’t know, I won’t see it. But it certainly wasn’t a plan, it certainly wasn’t like, “Oh well, let’s go out on this one.” (laughs) Though when I was doing the plans in San Francisco (?), I saw Danny DeVito’s stand-in and I told the dude I was retiring, and he was like, “This is your last thing?,” and I said yeah, and he said, “Don’t go out on this.” It was the first time I thought about that, it hadn’t even occurred to me. And then Terry George called me and said, “You couldn’t retire after Reservation Road? We might have been able to sell more tickets.”
Q: There is a rumor that Diddy is producing your album. Any truth to that?
JP: Um, I don’t know how much I can say. I’ll just say that we are going to work together shortly. As to whether that will be a complete album or not, I don’t know. But I’m doing a lot of the music and production. I love doing the music, I love programming beats and kind of working on the music, as much, if not more than the actual rapping. I mean, I hate fucking saying rapping, it just sounds ridiculous. I wish there was another fucking word for it, for what I do, because I don’t think of myself as a rapper. I do enjoy the writing process, writing rhymes and sitting alone listening to beats doing it. It’s pretty amazing. I guess you guys enjoy [writing] as well.
Q: How would you describe your sound?
JP: Um, under construction? Ha ha, that’s Missy Elliot. Well, it’s a sound… I don’t know, I don’t know. It’s not going to be… ultimately, the record is not going to be a rap record. I mean, it’s hip hop, there’s rap in it, but there’s singing and other stuff. I sound like such a fucking dick, but what I wanna do is make The Wall and shit, you know? It’s hard, because I’m an actor, or was an actor, so I’m theatrical. So I want things to be great, you know what I mean? I have one track right now that’s five minutes that I’m trying to make seven. It might just be seven minutes of pure misery, but hopefully it’s seven minutes.
Q: What is the message behind your album?
JP: I don’t have a message.
Q: When will it be released to the public?
JP: Um, I don’t know. I have 10 songs now, and three of them I think are really good — “Can I Get a Refund,” “If You’re Going to San Francisco,” and “Da Da Dum Dum.” And the others I think are pretty crap but I’ll work on them. I don’t know, I don’t really feel this pressure to get it out, and I think that also things are different now. Like, you don’t have to necessarily release a record, you know what I mean? You can have a web site where you sell a couple singles, you do an EP, then let it grow. So I’m not really sure, I’ve gone back and forth between wanting to make a double record versus saying I’m just gonna do an EP to start with. So I’m just amassing songs, and I think you just kind of boil it down to what you think is the best.
Q: Are there people you want to collaborate with?
JP: I want Dermot Mulroney, you know that actor? He’s an amazing cellist. I’ve know him for years, and he’s played a couple things on some older stuff. I’d like to work with him some more. I’d love to get Flea. Flea did the base for Young MC just way back in the day you know, so that would be kind of genius to get Flea. I saw Method Man recently at House of Blues perform with Redman, and he said he wanted to come in and do a verse, so we’ll see. Also Diddy knows a lot of great people and stuff, so we’ll see. I mean, my dream would be to have DJ Premier produce a track and have Chuck D do it, but Chuck D never would do it. …Or you know what would be cool? It’d be cool if I got Russell Crowe and Keanu Reeves and Jared Leto, and we just did our thing. That would be pretty dope. It’s not about success, it’s not about being quote-unquote good. I didn’t act because I wanted people to say that I was good. I enjoyed that process and now I enjoy this process. What can I say? It might suck, everyone might hate it, and I’d be the only one that likes it. But that’s all right, because I’ve been having an amazing time making music.
Q: There are two sides to music-making — the making of the record, which is an artistic statement, and then there’s the performing, getting out in front of a crowd and connecting. Which is more important to you?
JP: The record is more important to me, and that’s really what’s important to me. The performances thus far… look, Diddy just said, you’ve gotta get out there. I’ve been going around to these little clubs, but [he said] you have to do a show because it’s too easy to say, “Ahh, it’s just freestyling, and I fucked up, forget it!” and walk out. So I set up the show just for the experience, I was certain it was going to be a disaster. I was doing the mixes the night before, and I had no idea what the system was. I’m sitting there going, “Is the snare too loud? And if I pull it down, now is the bass too loud?” So I was rushing doing the mixes, and I’ve never done it before. It was such a weird concept — the idea of giving someone an iPod with a backing track! That was really strange to me, because I want to have a show, I want to have musicians and little things. So it was really part of the training, but the working is public, and I’m public, so you’re seeing the training. But what about this movie, Two Lovers?
Q: Well, you do drop a little rap in the movie.
JP: Yeah, James and I, we were prepping, rehearsing for that scene, and saying that we can’t just cut from the car with everyone hanging out, something has to happen, so what is it? So we talked about things, and said what do these dudes do? And guys this age that grew up in Brooklyn pretty much all love hip hop. James told me that he had a hip hop group. And I said, “Oh, that’s too genius! I can’t even fucking imagine…” So I said let me try something, and I had a few ideas that I jotted down. And we ended up doing all of them; I’m not sure which one he used in the movie.
Q: The film has a wonderful ambiguity, especially in its ending. Is there a chance for your character, Leonard, to find happiness, or [SLIGHT SPOILER ALERT — skip ahead one question] will he always be living in the shadow of Michelle (Gwyneth Paltrow)? What might be coming next for him after the movie ends?
JP: (pause) I don’t think it’s a very good life for Leonard. I imagine… well, I think he is going to find happiness, he’s just never going to find that idealized, romantic version of love/happiness. He’s just going to experience the reality. He’s going to have a few kids and probably take over his dad’s business, and the kids will have birthday parties and they’ll all laugh. And… what was Vinessa Shaw’s character? [Sandra.] Yeah, he’ll be married to Sandra and it’ll be fine, and I think he would just have a normal life.
Q: We’ve interviewed you numerous times over the years, and we can’t help but notice that the hip hop Joaquin looks very different than the leading man sex
symbol Joaquin we’ve seen in the past…
JP: Sex symbol! (laughs)
Q: What’s inspired the look?
JP: Look, it’s very much an effort… I don’t know what your excuse is (gesturing to one journalist, followed by laughter). I have to do things extreme physically as well. People do recognize me, and they know me as this kind of thing. I don’t know that this is “my look,” you know? But it’s been important for me to just do something that’s extreme, that separates me from that public Joaquin Phoenix persona, whatever the fuck that is. Or I’m just lazy. It certainly stops people from saying Johnny Cash. Now they can just say Grizzly Adams.
Q: This is your third movie with James Gray, after The Yards and We Own the Night. Are you sad about missing out on that sort of collaborative work experience, and others like it?
JP: I love James but I don’t love him that much, you know? I have to do what’s right for me. Of course there’s a part of me that will probably miss some of those moments, but I think that happens for everyone if you change your career or work on something else you there’s a part of you that’s going to miss your old job in a way. But maybe I can get him to direct a music video. I wanna do something “Thriller”-style, with a whole big intro and shit.
Q: The promotional part of the music career, you’ve already started thinking about that?
JP: I think you always have those lofty ambitions, but then I also think I’m just a fucking moron. Of course, I just want to imagine that would I do something great, but if I direct it, it would probably be one of the worst videos ever made. I think you strive for greatness, and you know you’ll never reach there because you’re not good enough, but that’s what you do. So hopefully I’ll come up some great concept, or maybe I’ll get lucky and Spike Jonze will want to do a music video or something.
Q: Joaquin, I work for MTV, and we had somebody send us a letter. …This guy is legit, and he’s the manager for Fall Out Boy, and he sent a letter to us asking to be your deejay. So I was going to give it to you if you want it (passes letter across table), and again, this guy really is legitimately the manager for Fall Out Boy, and he said that every good rapper needs a deejay, and he wants to be yours. He wants to be your Jam Master Jay.
JP: Oh, great. (takes paper and slowly crumples it up, tossing it over his shoulder; laughter) Well, I’m working on the show, but you don’t want to talk about everything because then when you don’t achieve it people will know that you didn’t achieve it. So the show is not just going to be me with a mic and a backing track. I might have a deejay, but it’s not going to be a typical hip hop show.
Q: The thing about hip hop is that there’s an obsession with quote-unquote keeping it real, and speaking about real experiences. For your audience, your experiences in life have likely been very different than your whole audience’s experiences…
JP: You mean, the whole thing is sort of like, “I woke up and they said action/And I was like, ‘Oh shit, where’s my mark? Oh shit!'”
Q: Well, that’s the sort of thing — what is keeping it real for a guy who’s turned to rapping after acting for almost 20 years?
JP: (pause) I know nothing about keeping it real, I know nothing about it. I don’t really know what that means. I don’t think anyone really knows what that means. But what are you asking? What is the content?
Q: Well, not what is the content but… when I listen to rappers randomly I experience parts of their lives, and I experience an understanding. What is it that a famous, rich, white actor is going to be bringing to hip hop that is going to resonate with people on a personal level?
JP: Not that rich. (pause, laughs) No, not very much. I don’t know.
Q: I want to ask you about working with the girls on this, Gwyneth Paltrow and Vinessa Shaw. Especially for Gwyneth this was kind of a different role, and I’m just wondering when you were working with her whether you guys bounced ideas off each other about her performance or yours or whatever. Was that part of the relationship?
JP: No, I don’t really do that. I don’t like to know what other actors are thinking and I don’t want them to know what I’m thinking necessarily, unless it’s important for a scene. I think that there are certain scenes, or moments where it’s important that you understand what the other person is doing and you might talk about it, but typically for me, the director was the only person I talked to about the choices and my intention for a scene, and I don’t really want to know [about someone else’s process]. But the experience on Two Lovers was great. I was genuinely surprised by how Gwyneth interpreted the character and what she did. Her first day, I’d been working for like two weeks, so I was comfortable by then. You get comfortable with the crew and everything. And she came in and I thought she was going to be nervous and take all day, but she just smoked me, I mean right away. I couldn’t believe it. It was terrifying, she was really amazing. She just arrived and she had the character down. Because you know, it seems at least in my experience, the first couple of days everyone is kind of moving around like this and they’re bumping into furniture and you’re trying to go, “Like, how do I walk, what do I do, what’s natural? How the fuck do I just say good morning to somebody and [make] it sound normal?” Because you look at it on a piece of paper and you start analyzing it and you’re like (in stilted delivery), “Good morning.” With both [Gwyneth] and Vinessa, neither of them ever skipped a beat, they were just right into it.
Q: James talked about the amount of takes you do when filming scenes. Are you usually the kind of person who gets it on the first take or the kind of person who likes to do multiple takes [from which] the director to cut?
JP: You didn’t hear the nickname, “One-Take Joaq”? (pause) No, I’m the type of person who has no idea. Like, I think that, for me, if I’m aware of something that I’m doing, then usually it’s bad. I think the only time that anything is good is when I’m not aware of it. So I don’t know how many takes I do. No, there’s not a conscious effort to try and give somebody more options. I just think you’re trying to still find out what the truth is and get to that. Sometimes it takes 40 takes and sometimes it happens in a few. I don’t know.
Q: Can you tell us about where you’re playing next? Do you have another date set up?
JP: No.
Q: Is there a web site to go to or anything?
JP: Not yet, coming up. Thanks guys, thanks a lot.
Coraline
Based on the 2002 children’s book by Neil Gaiman, and adapted and directed by Henry Selick — who also helmed The Nightmare Before Christmas, a movie many people erroneously credit to Tim Burton — Coraline is a multi-dimensional show-stopper, the first stop-motion animated feature conceived and photographed in stereoscopic 3-D. If last summer’s Wall▪E pushed the envelope for kid-pitched big screen fare, underscoring the fact that animation is an evolving medium and not just a genre unto itself, Coraline only further highlights that point: this is a delightfully engaging curio, an idiosyncratic adventure tale about learning to appreciate one’s circumstances.
The story centers on 11-year-old Coraline Jones (voiced by Dakota Fanning), who’s just relocated to rainy Oregon with her parents (voiced by Teri Hatcher and John Hodgman), writers who have little time for her. Feisty and curious, she checks in on her much older neighbors — a pair of eccentric washed-up actresses and a Russian trapeze artist — and even endures the chatterbox company of a local boy close to her age, Wybie (voiced by Robert Bailey, Jr.).
Mainly though, Coraline is bored. Stuck indoors, she uncovers a small, secret door wallpapered over (above). Later, venturing through an eerie passageway, she discovers an alternate version of her existence — a parallel reality where everything is similar to her real life, except much better. The adults, including her solicitous, button-eyed “Other Mother” (also voiced by Hatcher), are fun and welcoming, the colors all brighter, and meals come in super-sized portions, with plenty of dessert. Coraline begins to think that this other world might be where she belongs. But when her wondrously off-kilter, fantastical visits turn dangerous and “Other Mother” schemes to keep her there, Coraline musters all of her resourcefulness and determination in an effort to save herself and her family.
The care with which Coraline is rendered offers up all sorts of surface-thrill visual seductions — dust on glass surfaces, or the swirl of fog dissipating underfoot — and reflects more than just the ornately designed backgrounds of many animated films. With its spindly forms and sometimes ironic and macabre touches, there are echoes of The Nightmare Before Christmas, to be sure, as well as narrative parallels to Beetlejuice — a young girl unhappy in her big new home, connected to the spirit world, it turns out.
Mostly, though, Coraline is its own shiny new thing. The down-the-rabbit-hole quality of its story (yes, there’s a talking cat, voiced by Keith David) is a much better natural match for 3-D technology than the yawning conventionality of some previous efforts, like last year’s Fly Me to the Moon. That said, Coraline also never desperately leans on the 3-D for cheap affect; it’s merely a component of its storytelling. The film also benefits from some great vocal performances. A lot of animated movies plug in celebrity voices without much thought or care for overall fit, but Fanning is pitch-perfect as Coraline — you get a sense of the exasperation that fuels her character — and the rest of the cast is a similarly good fit.
While the narrative takes care to root Coraline’s dilemma in a very concrete manner — meaning there’s an actual story to explain the parallel dimension, a loose ghost story template — the film is in essence about awakened imagination, and also the minor-chord adolescent trauma (usually discovered by children a bit younger than Coraline) of discovering that one’s parents have lives outside of your own. Probably no talking cats, though. (Laika/Focus Features, PG, 100 minutes)
Christian Bale Screams Down Cinematographer
Hot news today: Christian Bale does not much like Shane Hurlbut, the cinematographer on Terminator Salvation, it seems. An epic, rafters-shaking scream-down, truly. I’ll give Bale a pass on about three-fifths of this captured rant, maybe more, because filmmaking is a tough, high-tension business, and when a quality take or moment is ruined by either some technical glitch or an entirely preventable screw-up, as I’ve witnessed a couple times, it’s hair-pullingly maddening.
But then Bale crosses the line, somewhere around the time he re-tees things up, starts asking questions he apparently doesn’t want answered, and seemingly makes a charge at Hurlbut. “I’m tellin’ you — I’m not asking, I’m telling you,” Bale bellows, and then, “I’m gonna fucking kick your ass if you don’t shut up for a second.” (Err… you’re the one talking the most, dude.) Hurlbut maybe should have just turtled, taken his public dressing-down, avoided eye contact and said nothing, walked away, etcetera. Instead he makes the mistake of trying to meekly re-explain his screw-up. Whoops… kerosene. This fire burns too long, though; clearly, Bale is a guy who just hasn’t been told to shut the fuck up in a long, long time. Meanwhile, director McG kind of comes off as a pussy here, no? Why isn’t he in the midst of this?
Push
Sci-fi action gets a wan workout in Push, an engagingly photographed but dramatically inert Hong Kong-set thriller in which various groups with paranormal abilities do battle over the future of a formula that heightens extra-cognitive powers. Lacking the kinetic, push-through certitude to unclog its muddled narrative, the film is hampered by a poorly delineated backdrop of intrigue which posits that the immediate future can be constantly changed by the tiniest actions, or even knowing about it. This creates a landscape in which no character action seems to have lasting consequence, either within the story, or emotionally for the audience.
Nick Gant (Chris Evans) is a second-generation telekinetic hiding in Hong Kong, trying to live off the grid and make a living through dice games. Fulfilling a prophecy made by his father before his death, 13-year-old Cassie Holmes (Dakota Fanning) shows up at Nick’s apartment, enlisting his help in locating an important suitcase. Fleeing some Chinese assassins, their on-the-fly investigatory work leads them to Kira Hudson (Camilla Belle), Nick’s ex-girlfriend and an on-the-run “pusher” — someone with skills so advanced they can plant a thought indistinguishable from reality in a subject’s mind — who is the only telepath to have ever survived drug trial testing by “the Division,” a shadowy government group who conducts human research.
Trying desperately to bring Kira in is a Chinese family gang, as well as Henry Carver (Djimon Hounsou), a Division agent also responsible for the death of Nick’s father. Nick, Cassie and Kira hook up with some other, differently abled paranormal loafers and try to stay alive and ahead of these groups, while plotting to find the suitcase with drugs that will… save Kira? Allow them to expose the Division? The intricate final plan — in which Nick writes sealed letters to each of his cohorts, and then wipes his memory of the act — creates a circumstance by which anything can happen, untethered to any emotional reality.
The most compelling thing about Push is its setting. Director Paul McGuigan (Lucky Number Slevin) shot the film entirely on location, which affords it a fresh look and feel. David Bourla’s screenplay, though, is a jumbled mess of narrative clichés and poor execution, at once terribly conventional and needlessly complex, like it’s setting the table for a sprawling TV series. By trying to establish personal connections between characters rather than clearly establishing the rules of its tele-psychic play, Push actually raises far more questions than it ever convincingly answers. If Nick is out of practice and not very good with his telekinetic gifts in the beginning of the movie, what triggers his sudden ability to control weapons and stop bullets? If the drug-enhanced Kira is the powerful prototype for a new breed of telekinetic soldiers, why is she still susceptible to Carver’s “pushes”? If the Division is a secret American governmental organization, why would they work at all with potential rivals in the Chinese, rather than merely dispatch their own minions? If “watchers” like Cassie predict the future based on intent, why can’t one see the aforementioned plan to mask intent through sealed letters as it’s being hatched? These questions, and many more, occupy one’s mind more than actual events unfolding on screen. For the full original review, from Screen International, click here. (Summit Entertainment, PG-13, 111 minutes)
Robert De Niro Demands I Give Him a Painting
From the strange dream files we occasionally indulge here at Shared Darkness, I woke up this morning from a dream in which Robert De Niro gave me a piece of multimedia artwork he created… and then demanded that I gift him with a painting of my own creation. Weird.
Fanboys
The cinematic equivalent of Guns N’ Roses’ Chinese Democracy — a project delayed so long that many began to doubt its actual existence — Fanboys is about a group of passionate Star Wars geeks who set off on a road trip to try to see the latest film in the series before anyone else. It’s also kind of like discovering a mangled, half-eaten tin of your roommate’s chocolate crème pie in the refrigerator; it’s not wholly formed or at all pretty-looking, and you know it’s perhaps not good for you, yet you somewhat enjoy it all the same.
It’s 1999 and, several years removed from high school, young Eric Bottler (Sam Huntington) is the only one of his peer set who’s matured a bit, mostly the result of a job at his father’s car dealership. Two of his friends — Windows (Jay Baruchel) and Hutch (Balls of Fury‘s Dan Fogler, noticeably older than the rest of the characters) — kill time in hourly-rate fashion at a comic book store, along with Zoe (Kristen Bell, breathing as much energy as she can into the “spunky female” role). When they tell Eric that his semi-estranged ex-best bud Linus (Chris Marquette) has inoperable cancer, Eric revives an old scheme hatched when they were all much younger — to drive across the country, break into George Lucas’ Skywalker Ranch, and steal and screen a print of the hotly anticipated forthcoming prequel.
Fanboys was originally conceived and scripted at the height of Phantom Menace mania in 1998, by Ernest Cline. A decade later, however, Adam Goldberg also nets a screenwriting credit, and a handful of re-shot sequences by Steven Brill allegedly abut those of originating, credited director Kyle Newman, who shot the film a couple years ago. Not a fan of the whole terminal illness plotline, executive producer Harvey Weinstein is also reported to have tinkered heavily with a cut of the movie, which seems borne out by liberally sprinkled ADR asides.
Naturally, owing to its multiple chefs, there’s considerable schizophrenia with respect to the movie’s tone. Some of this surfaces right out of the gate, when an opening credit crawl that mimics the Star Wars series concludes with an iPhone joke, then yields to a party sequence set to Chumbawamba’s “Tubthumper,” an ultra-specific demarcation of era if ever there was one. “Wait,” one thinks, “is this going to be an honest period piece comedy or just a referential free-for-all hung loosely upon this conceit?”
Some of both, it turns out. Early on, the movie’s banter helps it seem a bit smarter (Of Mice and Men and Picasso are both amusingly evoked), and the white-hot fervor of fandom is honestly dissected in the form of a story-strand feud between Star Wars and Star Trek fans that is funny, if a bit broadly played. Before long, though, Fanboys reveals itself a peddler of desultory set pieces (a Full Monty-type male striptease, a hallucinatory drug sequence that could be nipped from an Oliver Stone flick, a half-sketched plot device involving geek-web icon Harry Knowles, as played by Ethan Suplee). And since the characters never really discuss Linus’ fate, Fanboys misses a chance to blossom into something more emotionally rooted; instead it’s just a slapstick romp. Indeed, it’s not until the end of the movie that it becomes fully apparent that Linus’ illness wasn’t actually just a fib told to get the reticent Eric on the road.
So Fanboys is in no way, shape or form a great accomplishment of filmmaking. But if there’s a saving grace to the entire enterprise, it’s the easy rapport between the lead actors, as well as the fact that it’s even more smartly cast in hindsight. (Danny McBride, Will Forte and Craig Robinson all have bit parts, Seth Rogen plays two characters to surprisingly amusing effect, and a few more star cameos figure prominently into the proceedings.) That great pedigree, and the force (pun embraced) of its loosey-goosey personality is ultimately enough to help Fanboys just scrape by with a marginal, qualified recommendation… at least for those in its fanboy target demo. (MGM/The Weinstein Company, PG-13, 90 minutes)
Dollars
Written and directed by Richard Brooks, 1971’s Dollars is a weird, freewheeling genre mash-up — part heist flick drama, part screwball character comedy. Parts work, parts don’t, but it’s still an instructive watch, if mainly to suss out how genre filmmaking has changed over the past 35 years.
A Nebraska-born con man working abroad in Hamburg as a security consultant, Joe Collins (Warren Beatty, sporting a Rod Blagojevich-esque helmet of hair) crafts a plan for a bank heist with ditsy hooker Dawn Divine (Goldie Hawn), whose line of work puts her in contact with a shady, money-skimming army sergeant (Scott Brady), a German drug dealer/assassin (Arthur Brauss) and a Vegas mobster (Robert Webber), among others. Operating under the assumption that criminals can’t squeal to the cops if their ill-gotten gains suddenly go missing from a safety deposit box, Joe concocts a scheme by which he and Dawn target only the secret stashes of the aforementioned crooks. After Dawn phones in a fake bomb/theft threat, Joe locks himself in the bank’s vault and deftly avoids the timed, oscillating security camera, emptying a trio of safety deposit boxes into one opened by Dawn, who arrives to empty it the next day, after news coverage of the phony foiled theft. But when these thugs realize they’ve been double-crossed, Dawn and Joe must run for their lives in order to keep the loot.
And when I say run, I mean that seriously. There’s a lot of set-up here… more than an hour’s worth of character stuff (we get to know all the marks, individually), and plenty of faux-scenic dawdling. But when the movie stretches its third act legs, it gets even more bizarre, culminating in an over-the-river-and-through-the-woods finale that finds Joe, hot suitcase in hand, fleeing through snow on foot, in car and in train. This sequence goes on forever, to absurdly comic lengths. Perhaps this is part of some subtextual point, running parallel to the movie’s character-based comedy, but given that overall Dollars treats the heist stuff rather seriously this seems somewhat doubtful.
Brooks, a 1961 Oscar winner for Best Screenplay for Elmer Gantry, crafts a nice character for Beatty, and has a deft touch with dialogue to boot. There’s some tart double entendres about “boxes,” and the film may be — I’m not totally sure — the original source of the infamous, frat-friendly quote, “One thing that doesn’t belong in her mouth is words.” But Dawn Divine is thinly sketched, and Hawn’s portrayal — distractably flitting to and fro — is overly broad and not rooted in any recognizable choice of character or background. Joe and Dawn’s motivations are parceled out in big, manic monologues, and the film feels flimsy when it tries to milk Dawn’s angsty doubt for comedy. (Terrible ADR in a couple scenes sure doesn’t help, either.) Things work a lot better, and feel more natural, when Brooks is trading in small, telling details, like a nervous bank employee slipping a cigarette into his mouth the wrong end first, or Joe concocting an at-moment’s-notice fib to get out of some unanticipated questioning. One thing’s for sure — Hollywood heist movies, like Steven Soderbergh’s Ocean’s series, have gone slick, and grown much more convoluted. But there’s a plenty rich screen history of cracked, cocksure slightly eccentric grifters and white-collar smooth operators, as Dollars proves.
Housed in a regular Amray plastic case, Dollars comes to DVD presented in 1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen, with Dolby digital English and French audio tracks, and optional subtitles in both languages as well. The billed supplemental extras here are pretty slight — they amount to the movie’s theatrical trailer and a minute-long “Martini Movies Collection” (the banner under which this title was released) promo clip that ends with a martini recipe. To purchase Dollars via Amazon, click here. B- (Movie) C- (Disc)
Dakota Fanning Gets Drunk, Push-y
Does Dakota Fanning — all dolled up in angst-y, Kool Aid-colored locks — have an agitated drunk scene in the PG-13-rated Push, opening next week? Why yes, yes she does. And while she’s a good actress, it tells you she probably hasn’t yet tied one on in real life, bless her soul.
The Uninvited
A space-filling genre programmer through and through, The Uninvited is one of those movies that plugs along in such avowedly unfussy, obvious fashion as to lull its audience into a shrugging sense of giggly complacency; it spends a lot of time and effort convincing folks that it’s nothing more than an exercise in stylistic manipulation. Then — aha! — comes that One Big Twist, and everything is turned upside down, leaving the audience reeling in appreciation. Right… err, right? Well, not really. No matter how wildly they reframe the narrative, story twists applied lazily just come across as weird and/or yawn-inducing, and unfortunately that’s the case here. The Uninvited isn’t quite clever enough to earn any admiration for its switcheroo finale.
The film opens with Maine teenager Anna (Emily Browning, above left) describing a terrible nightmare to her therapist. In centers around her cancer-stricken mother, who died eight months ago in a fire — an event Anna witnessed, which then led her to try to kill herself. After the therapist gives her some sunny, idiotic advice (“Go home, kiss a boy, get into trouble, finish what you started!”), Anna bounces out of the psychiatric institution where she’s been held with nary a hint of any dark clouds swirling around her, save some scars on her wrists.
Her novelist father Steven (David Strathairn) picks her up, and Anna returns home to her older sister Alex (Arielle Kebbel, above right) and Rachel (Elizabeth Banks), the live-in nurse who’s moved in on the girls’ dad. Anna gets a visit from her mother’s ghost, and when the girls find out about their father’s recent marriage proposal to Rachel, they become convinced that the mysterious interloper did their mother in — a notion Rachel’s penchant for control and breathy, menacing whispers does little to dissuade. Some Nancy Drew-style investigation ensues, and things get spookier when Anna learns of an unsolved homicide case from 10 years earlier involving an in-home caregiver named Mildred Kemp.
Based on a 2003 Korean horror film from director Kim Jee-Woon, and adapted by Craig Rosenberg, Doug Miro and Carlo Bernard, The Uninvited plays for most of its running time, as mentioned, as a very straightforward, on-the-nose, domestic thriller — a downgrade, killer-stepmom lever-puller much in the vein, narratively speaking, of The Glass House or The Hand That Rocks the Cradle. Milking Anna’s instability for slight pokes to the small of the back, there are visions of her Kentucky-fried mom, as well as bleeding keyholes and the like. No stringy, wet-haired Asian girls, though.
As directed by British brothers Charles and Thomas Guard, the movie makes nice use of some effective camera angles when trading in this dream-state spookery that bedevils Anna. But when it comes time for The Uninvited to wow us, and pull the rug out from under an audience, it fails. In the plainest terms, this is evident in the several weak flashbacks that comprise the movie’s post-twist scenes; clever films show you what was there all along, but you failed to consider integral. The Uninvited just lays its revelation on the table, but does nothing to earn it, or make it stick. Indeed, leaving the theater you might be reflecting back on any number of scenes, and thinking how they don’t quite fully make sense in light of the twist.
Browning has pouty, young Angelina Jolie-type lips, and is kind of a cool choice around which to center the movie, in that she isn’t conventionally va-voomish, or made out to look as such. Banks, though, is required to act significantly different depending on what a given scene calls for from her character, and in the end the script still hinges to an awkward degree on adults being required to do dumb things, in order to make Anna and Alex the center of the story, or force certain circumstances upon them. It’s a slight, to-scale success, I guess, in the sense that The Uninvited is able
to somewhat lull inattentive younger audiences into thinking they’re
watching a different kind of movie than what’s actually unfolding. The
narrative execution of its conceit, though, is fairly uninviting. (Paramount/DreamWorks, PG-13, 87 minutes)