I never thought I would see the day, Paul Newman is gone. He died on Friday, at his home in Connecticut, from complications from cancer. Mr. Newman was not only a fabulous actor, but he started a vast philanthropic food company, Newman’s Own, that produces some of the finest (in this author’s humble opinion) food you can pick up at the grocery store. Over the history of the company, 100% of the profits have been donated to charity, the total donated just surpassed $220 million. Not exactly a paltry sum.
Newman will be most remembered for his performances in The Hustler, The Sting, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, and Cool Hand Luke. (PS, if you haven’t seen any of these, after you get finished punishing yourself, drive yourself over to the nearest Blockbuster and rent every single one.)
He personified cool, and showed the world that you could still be an actor and a human being. He will be missed.
Q: How many Coen brothers does it take to screw in a light bulb?
A: They wouldn’t. It would be more funny to film Francis McDormand and George Clooney accomplish that.
A few months shy of a year, right after winning Academy Awards for best written, produced and directed film of 2007, Joel and Ethan Coen breathlessly churn out something completely different. Such confident, heady, speedy workmanship that is Burn After Reading makes me wonder if the Coens realize No Country For Old Men - a film full of Chigurh - actually won the Best Picture. For a comedy about government intelligence, it is curiously, though appropriately ominous. This coming from the Coen Brothers, I am not surprised. I am overjoyed.
Burn After Reading is not as broad and eccentric as Raising Arizona (1987) and O Brother, Where Art Thou (2000). Don’t get me wrong, it’s still eccentric. The comedy is more subdued like Barton Fink (1991) where the stuck up title character (John Tuturro) proclaims himself a writer of the common man (“The life of the mind. There’s no road map for that territory”.) while ignoring a bumbling insurance salesman (John Goodman) who says “I could tell you some stories”.
Osborne Cox (John Malkovich from Being John Malkovich), an intelligent analyst for the CIA, is demoted due to his alcoholism. He doesn’t believe that’s the case because he personally examines how much liquor is in his first glass and then pours just a little bit back into the bottle. Such a conscientious act would never be perform by an alcoholic. Osborne quits to the immediate displeasure of his forever exasperated working-wife Katie (Tilda Swinston who is having a ball here). Fed up with pointless bureaucracy, Osborne decides to write a book detailing his work history and Katie plots to divorce and bleed him dry.
Harry Pfarrer (George Clooney) is cheating on his wife Sally (Elizabeth Marvel) with Katie. Both women separately confide to Harry that the other is a “cold-hearted bitch”. He must be attracted to that type. Considering this, it’s funny which target audience both women’s careers aim towards. Being a notorious sexaholic, Harry is flexible toward the other women he meets online and eventually beds. He makes good company. What an adorable adulterer; he schemes rather lightheartedly and is genuinely surprised (and hurt) when those he trusts turn on him.
Over at the fitness club Hardbodies, we meet its motivational trainers Linda Litzke (Frances McDormand, Mrs. Joel Coen) and Chad Feldheimer (Brad Pitt). Chad is an aging hipster who tries to stay young by streaking his hair, keeping exercise priority number one, and occasionally breaking into dance when excited. Linda is sweet, lonely and pushing forty. She has resorted to finding a mate online. Desiring a man with a great sense of humor (who doesn’t?), she screens her dates with the same romantic comedy playing in theaters. She has (wrongly) convinced herself no man wants her because of her body and seeks modifications under the knife. Her plastic surgeon, mercilessly dotting her flesh with a felt pen, sells her on tummy tucks, breast augmentation, face lifts like a car salesman ticking off new features at a price inflation.
They both come across a burnt disc (“Mac or PC?”) holding Osborne’s secret files. This property could pad their accounts. Their scam is in the same spirit as the one in Waking Ned Devine (1998). To them it’s rather harmless. Chad is the kind of dope who thinks “Reward!” for going out of his way to return sacred government files instead of blackmail. Even after the issue of blackmail is made very clear, he still thinks “Reward!” because his own goodwill counterattacks any notion of perceiving himself as an exploiter. Whenever he’s found out of something wicked, he immediately smiles cheerfully, convinced that whatever trouble he’s in can be laughed off. Heck, he’d just as soon treat you to a large health shake and an afternoon of laughs to make sure bygones are bygones.
The richly experienced character actor Richard Jenkins is such a good sport after his rewarding lead work in this year’s The Visitor. Here he plays Ted, a middle-aged manager of the gym who secretly pines for Linda’s heart. He’s a sweet, uncomplicated man who has the disadvantage of loving her for exactly who she is. She is not attracted to that kind of guy (translation: loser). He knows this but that still doesn’t stop him from doing just about anything to make her happy. It helps the pain of unrealized expectations and actions to be good to someone whose opinion actually matters.
Most of the humor is in observing the way people speak. How people deep in conversation are oblivious to their art (“Appearances can be very deceptive”.) versus the way smart people still sound dumb. Note how Osborne pronounces “memoirs”. He enunciates it so excruciatingly and dryly as if to say: “See! I am one of those rare exceptions on this planet who are naturally well-versed!” He’s like a stuck-up nincompoop who says “absolutely”, the four-syllable equivalent of “yes”, instead of just saying “yes”.
There are small and wonderful pleasures to be had in the crevasses and corners of this film. When Linda looks through the wallet of a one-night stand, she uncovers gift cards from 7-Eleven and Safeway (’Ingredients for Life!’). The engagement between a father and son’s heart-to-heart on a drifting boat. How Chad approaches Osborne’s car for an important rendezvous and remembers to take off the headphones to his iPod before entering. The way a chirpy television morning host interrupts her guest, an author reading her children’s book, to show viewers at home “the illustration” - the book’s cover credits the writer with no mention of the illustrator.
The biggest gut-buster is the revelation of Harry’s secret project he’s building in his basement. The build-up carries an apprehensively dark and mysterious tone. The payoff is in the vein as the Stonehenge prop in Rob Reiner’s This Is Spinal Tap - on a scale from one to ten, it’s an eleven. It had me howling well into the next scene. Once you get past how wrong and creepy it is, it is actually rather sweet. The purpose of the device is well-intentioned, especially given the means of Harry. Many men would be appalled and insulted if their partner were to use such a device. Harry is an exception. What a lucky woman to have such an endearing knucklehead for a husband.
The versatile Carter Burwell, as dedicated a musical collaborator to the Coens as Howard Shore to David Cronenberg, has scored Burn After Reading with an urgent, thumping, and somewhat melancholy soundtrack. It is a hybrid of his scores from the predatory chords of the underrated James Foley thriller Fear (1996) and the apocalyptic jungle-like tones of Spike Jonze’s magical Adaptation (2003). Earlier this year, Burwell committed work to Martin McDonagh’sIn Bruges, a darkly comical and dramatic masterpiece that was my favorite film of 2008 for six months until The Dark Knight bumped it to second place (Between you and me, whenever I watch my In Bruges DVD, sometimes I’m tempted to put it back on top).
The Coens and their cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki (Children Of Men, 2006) apply a very straight-forward, yet engaging visual approach to contrast with the labyrinthine, oddball events on screen. There’s even an intimating yet quirky sensibility in the framing as if the space around the characters make them more insignificant. Burn After Reading doesn’t look like a general comedy that’s over-lit as a ploy to make the audience happier and receptive to hysteria. It stays true to the look of its adult thriller, while letting the madcap characters themselves lighten their dark surroundings.
One striking image depicts Harry stranded and paranoid on a suburban road where he is back-lit by a yellow sunset and dark leafy trees create a shadowy frame around him. There are a few sensationalistic shots. A couple of Dutch angles are used when looking up a staircase from Harry’s basement where Sandy inquires what’s behind gated curtain and another looking downstairs at a very shaken Harry in a different house. A moving shot at floor level following an agent’s footsteps across the stark CIA hallway is a reverse homage to running dress shoes in The Hudsucker Proxy (1993), the one that starts the infamous Hula Hoop Montage - a worthy candidate for Scene To Be Seen. Much like déjà vu, one violent confrontation near the film’s end is a visual quotation including composition, action, and execution from the masterpiece Fargo (1996).
The Coens transcend their targeted genres; improving upon the espionage thriller, the social satire, and the romantic comedy. Like Paul Thomas Anderson’s Punch Drunk Love (2002), Burn After Reading applies tension and danger in its romantic comedy, a genre generally treated as passively light where tension is needed to be more effective. Both films examine the lonely heart yearning for a compassionate partner in a way that is painfully real and delightfully zany. ‘Here We Go’. The Coens could have easily made a devastating drama about the dead ends of Internet Dating, the temptations and consequences of adultery, and the dire cover-ups made by a calmly, sanctimonious government agency. The screwball elements just make these compelling issues easier to digest.
Somehow, while reminiscing about Burn After Reading, it is at once so thoughtful and yet it seems like such a lark. This film is so smart that it doesn’t resort to having a dimwit like Chad pick up on the crude connotation of Osborne’s surname. However, they are not above naming the intelligence expert Cox. There is a difference between celebrating crudeness - it is human nature, after all - and wallowing in it. The Coens, like all good comedians, don’t coach you to laugh at their jokes. They remain stone-faced and quietly relish the joy when people laugh of their own accord. You can’t hold hands with wit.
People deserve the movies they choose. So many movies are made to cater to those with lowered expectations. A laugh track is welcomed by those who tense up at being challenged after paying the price of admission. So many movies are merely okay. They are rolled and doled like dough; geared toward the lowest common denominator with lame story lines that logically feature very stupid characters. Burn After Reading is about stupid characters. This is what happens when the filmmakers are as bright as a professionally-manned film projection bulb. We really deserve Burn After Reading.
The new Nanette Burstein documentary American Teen observes and even tampers with a senior class’ transcendence through a high school (“Total caste system”) in Warsaw, Indiana, a small American town that’s labeled “Red State all the way”. To set the stage, the filmmakers all but steal the compact and diverse grouping of stereotypes from the influential John Hughes cult film The Breakfast Club (1985). We are introduced to five main players attending Warsaw Community High School: Colin Clemens (The Jock), Megan Krizmanich (The Princess), Jake Tusing (The Geek), Mitch Reinholt (The Heartthrob in place of The Criminal), and Hannah Bailey (The Rebel). Any moment in American Teen would have been appropriate to play ‘Don’t You (Forget About Me)’ by Simple Minds.
This film is really about the fear that stems in adolescence and stirs into oncoming adulthood. The fear of being defined by your vices and insecurities brought up by those vicious, maddening years of being a teenager. The fear of realizing your idealistic youth spent in middling, regretful pastimes that are glibly called ‘the best years of your life’. It is dominated by the fear that things will not get better while the present is eaten up by internal bitterness. High school can really suck. Thankfully the clouds clear and the sun comes out on graduation day.
Colin, a self-described jock, is a nice enough guy. Whenever he smiles, the bottom half of his face reminds me of the Elephant Man (John Hurt). High school basketball is a populist blood sport in this town. Adults actually wear all-body painted team colors in the gym stands. Its citizens are about as obsessed as the Massillon, Ohio populace was with high school football in the Ken Carlson documentary Go Tigers! (2001) where it is customary to hold back boys to repeat the eighth grade because they’ll be older and bigger as football players in senior year.
The stakes are considerably higher for poor Colin if he doesn’t get a scholarship to play basketball in college, he will have to join the army and go to Iraq. His dad says “get the rebounds or it’s the army with a smile”. However engaging this subplot is, it pales in comparison with Steve James’ masterful Hoop Dreams (1993), the pedestal of documentary filmmaking that showed us the hardships and brimming humanity of two inner-city Chicago teens playing high school basketball and dreaming of making the NBA. There were scenarios in that three-hour movie that were laced with deep ironies and great joys.
Samantha stands in as the princess who many speculate in awe over her dulled beauty. Her personality is as lazy as Paris Hilton’s facial features. Samantha, for the most part, teeters between indifference and vindictiveness. A scene of her using a firearm in target practice is an appropriate metaphor for her lethality. Early in the school term, she displays a sociopathic mean streak. First she is instrumental in sending an image of a female classmate topless to every other student and then leaves cruel remarks in the victim’s voice-mail. After laughing hysterically, Samantha comes to her senses long enough to suggest “…leav(ing) her a message not to kill herself”. She has the makings of a Sgt. Charles Graner.
Samantha’s repugnant acts escalate until she gets caught, which is her only regret: “It’s horrible to be backstabbed at the last minute.” Very late in the film, a tragic event revealed around Samantha’s troubled family history isn’t enough to garner her sympathy. Finally, Samantha pines for a future where she will be surrounded by healthy, like-minded people. She simply exhausts my versatile ability to empathize. I make a point to keep away from people like her.
Justin chastises himself for his band participation, his awkwardness, his monotone, his acne-riddled cheeks, and plays Warcraft. With the upcoming student dance approaching, he bemoans “I wish I had a girl to dance with”. He has an animated dream sequence where he is virtual warrior who battles monsters and saves the damsel-hobbit in distress. The short remains faithful to that most irritating cliché where the pretty girl’s smile reveals, of all horrors, braces.
Rising above his insecurity, Justin occasionally gets girlfriends who don’t stay for very long and for good reason. Perhaps being the subject of a documentary is a likely attraction considering the YouTube-posting, fifteen-seconds-of-fame mentality. When Justin is dumped in a food court, his ex’s eyes never rise away from her Blackberry. Justin becomes downright pitiful as he lays his cheek against the table and remarks how much grease he has left. Much of Justin’s antics and eventual spiral into excess drinking and kissing strangers in Mexico is off-putting. Justin gives geeks a bad name.
Hanna, the brightest star here, is a rebellious and funky artist who aspires to become a filmmaker: “I want people to remember me. Not work nine to five and die”. It’s a no-brainer. She inspires guys who developed crushes for Juno - that snarky, pregnant goddess immortalized by Ellen Page. Despite her eccentric and lively demeanor, she has taken some very hard blows. After being emotionally pulverized by her then-boyfriend in a very vulnerable position, she is so devastated that she cannot go back to school with him there. Her lengthy absence is called on by the uncaring school administration threatening to deny her graduation if she avoids another day at school.
Exasperated with living in this suffocating town, she talks to her parents about moving to California and is told coldly told by her conservative mother that “(she) is not special”. Hanna is the most likable and most sympathetic and deserving of a better future. She has a stand-off near the end of the film that inspired cheers from the audience and yours truly. Hanna redeems and glorifies the geek title.
Mitch is a guy who plays basketball, likes to socialize, yet isn’t a very interesting person. Midway he has an epiphany about his feelings for Hanna, a girl outside his social circle. She is struck by the surface. After her previous break-up, Hanna embraces her good fortune that a popular hunk would even consider her. While “Love Is In The Air” is sung by John Paul Young on the soundtrack, the two even hold hands while driving in her car. In my notes, I referred to Mitch as a “lucky bastard” and the next page reads “worthless anus-scum” for what he does later. Forget being a heartthrob - Mitch is a criminal.
While watching American Teen, you might find yourself tempted to hum Mountain Town by Trey Parker and Matt Stone. There are some keen details depicting the routine of a middle American high school. There are updates from lame student news videos that are broadcast on thirteen-inch televisions in each classroom. The National Anthem is uniformly pledged every morning. From a Canadian point of view, this seems rather excessive. The parking lot in front of the school building looks more like a shopping mall. Would it be rude to observe that the all-white basketball team has a token black guy? The most chilling observation is a marine and army memorial shrine dedicated to past students who were killed fighting in Iraq.
Director Nanette Burstein has made a moderately entertaining documentary that doesn’t measure up to her previous works On The Ropes(1999), a powerful account about a group of boxers that follows one innocent, Tyrene Manson, into an unjust criminal trial, and The Kid Stays in the Picture (2002), a fascinating memoir depicting the rise and fall and semi-rise of Hollywood producer Robert Evans (The Godfather, Chinatown). The visual flair that drive these stories is well exercised by Burstein; however, The Jeff Danna score for The Kid Stays in the Picture is infinitely more memorable and effective than anything music editors Chris Douridas and Jim Schultz have contributed to American Teen.
Frankly, the material in American Teen isn’t as consistently compelling, but despite a few lags, is rarely boring. Much of it looks as if it were shot like a fictional film with double-takes and conversation set pieces that seem too good to be true. There is a contrivance mostly throughout that feels staged rather than spontaneously captured. I doubt that montage depicting each of everyone’s reaction to a scandalizing image by computer and cell-phone was not rehearsed. Though there are moments I am tempted to forgive, such as Colin’s father sending off his son in a get-up I would never reveal here. Each of the main characters has an animated sequence that visualizes their deepest thoughts. My personal favorite was a piece of stop-motion depicting “Hanna’s Depression” that is like a cross between Caroline and Clive Barker.
American Teen is worth seeing; however, it is not in the same league as this year’s most prestige documentaries Standard Operating Procedure and Man On Wire. Watching these teenagers graduate, I wonder if Burstein would revisit them in ten years in time for the reunion. The update could be in the same vein as Michael Apted’s Up documentary series. American Teen may not be Oscar worthy, but it obliterates any fond nostalgia from your own high school experience. Outside the theatre on my way out, there were ushers giving out buttons depicting whose team of the five one would like to belong to. Had I chosen, I’d have jumped on the Hanna bandwagon in a second. I hope to see a film of hers one day.
For all the comic book fans and especially those of Alan Moore’s absolute classic comic/graphic-novel “Watchmen”, the highly anticipated movie version is set to launch in 2009. Directed by Zack Snyder(300), the trailer has already been getting comments across the blogosphere for having extremely cool graphics.
Not all’s good in Watchmen land though, the series creator, Alan Moore, doesn’t support the comic being adapted to the big screen…
“I would rather not know [about the movie],” said Moore. “[Zack Snyder] may very well be [a very nice guy], but the thing is that he’s also the person who made 300. I’ve not seen any recent comic book films, but I didn’t particularly like the book 300. I had a lot of problems with it, and everything I heard or saw about the film tended to increase [those problems] rather than reduce them: that it was racist, it was homophobic, and above all it was sublimely stupid. I know that that’s not what people going in to see a film like 300 are thinking about but… I wasn’t impressed with that… I talked to Terry Gilliam in the ’80s, and he asked me how I would make Watchmen into a film. I said, ”Well actually, Terry, if anybody asked me, I would have said, ‘I wouldn’t.”’ And I think that Terry [who aborted his attempted adaptation of the book] eventually came to agree with me. There are things that we did with Watchmen that could only work in a comic, and were indeed designed to show off things that other media can’t.”
Zack Snyder’s comments on what he thinks of Alan Moore’s reaction to him making the movie…
“We all want to please Alan, and I think that’s a noble thing to want to do. There’s nothing wrong to get the guy who frickin’ created the thing to not hate it, I don’t think that’s an outrageous thing to want,” said Snyder. “I think the approach is to assume that the movie is better, and that’s a mistake. I would never make any assumptions.”
He also has told fans at Comic Con last year that the best he can hope for is that Alan Moore will someday watch the DVD and say, “You know, they didn’t fuck it up that bad.”
In terms of the character line up we have Billy Crudup as Dr. Manhattan, Patrick Wilson as Nite Owl, Matthew Goode as Ozymandias, Jeffrey Dean Morgan as the Comedian, Malin Akerman as Silk Spectre, and — in an inspired bit of news — Jackie Earle Haley as Rorschach.
So far the movie looks to be about 3 hours long, which is pretty long for a super-hero epic, but I can understand the length from just reading the comic book and the mazing amount of detail that went into it. What is interesting is that the “Tales of the Black Freighter”, which is the story-within-a-story in the Watchmen comic, is set to be released as a seperate DVD (obviously to make more money off the fans). either way I’d buy it, I just hope that, as Zack had mentioned, they don’t fuck it up too badly.
From what I’ve seen in the trailer though, at least it looks cool. For everyone reading this, get the comic, I very highly recommend it.
The Changeling is the story of Christine Collins’ missing son in 1928. The Los Angeles Police department was desparately looking for good publicity, so when they found a boy claiming to be her son they gave him to her. She then set off to try to find out what happened to her real son. Check out the trailer below.
Hopefully this role will made up for some of Jolie’s well…crappy roles, namely Wanted. It opens to a limited engagement October 24th.
Once Upon A Time: Six-year-old Alexandria (Catinca Untaru), one of the injured patients in a Los Angeles hospital circa 1920, wanders the limey and creamy walls looking for something to help pass the time. She has a doughy and lovable face that is genuine, animated, and suggests a definite sharpness of thought. She comes across Roy Walker (Lee Pace), an American stuntman working in the Hollywood “flickers”, who is now being treated for his paralyzed legs from an occupational hazard. He is welcoming and befriends the little Romanian girl. Her presence distracts him from an inky cloud of depression.
Their bond grows when he tells her an epic story that is silly yet strong, perplexing yet straight-forward, fantastical yet damned. Her own imagination manifests, reinterprets, and even edits his words into a hodgepodge of visually radical planes, structures, and characters. A whole new universe takes us away from the confines of the hospital and into a land of eye candy.
The Fall is not the best film of the year, but it is one of the most special. While watching it, I realized that I have never seen this movie before. What I mean is that most of the movies I’ve seen are a variation on other films I have seen. Out of the cookie-cutter machine a la Edward Scissorhands, a strange butterfly-shaped cookie has escaped the line: The Fall is a genuine original. What a fresh breeze it is to have a filmmaker throw out that unwritten book that rules out exploration and approaches deemed too strange and melodramatic for mainstream expectations. Here is a work by an artist who exercises his liberties selfishly in the best sense of the word, but not without purpose.
I did, however, come up with a few films that vaguely resemble its surface. One is Rob Reiner’s The Princess Bride (1987) where a guardian entertains a sick child in bed with a fantasy story. The exotic, foreign and colorfully vibrant environments of The Fall reminded me of the Arabian fantasy The Thief of Baghdad (1940), an Alexander Korda production. The most recent one is Pan’s Labyrinth (2006), one of the very best films of this decade, resembling The Fall in spirit but not emotionally. The Guillermo del Toro masterpiece (the adult equivalent) has different motives than The Fall (the child equivalent) and should not be felt the same way. Ophelia comes to conclusions about human nature that Alexandria is too young to even conceive.
For seventeen years, Tarsem traveled the world playing location scout for his dream film - a seed growing inside his mind. In that time he worked with great success as a director of music videos and commercials for large conglomerates, earning millions of dollars for his visionary talents. Many directors in advertising would often muse that they would personally finance their own feature film (always a would-be masterpiece) until time caught up to snuff that claim from becoming a reality. Not Tarsem. After losing his long-time girlfriend and potential family, he turned his savings into making art. A movie will substitute a child for now. David Fincher (Zodiac, 2007), one of the film’s producers and no stranger to advertising, told Tarsem “You happen to be the fool that has done it”.
A year after appearing at the Telluride Film Festival back in 2006, every distributor was too timid to pick it up. It was Roy Andersson’s Songs From The Second Floor(2002) all over again. When released (more like saved) by amigos Fincher and music video-turned-wunderbar filmmaker Spike Jonze (Being John Malkovich, 1999), The Fall was granted a limited theatrical release last Spring. Living in Vancouver wasn’t much fun where no screening of The Fall was held. I know people who were looking forward to it and are still traumatized by the experience of Tarsem Withdrawal.
The make-believe story involves a band of unique men who each have just cause to seek out and destroy the near-omnipresent villain Governor Odious (Daniel Caltagirone). Our heroes include The Masked Bandit who leads The Indian (Jeetu Merma - perceived by Alexandria that he is from India in place of Roy’s Native American), Otta Benga (Marcus Wesley) the Ex-Slave from Africa whose expertise is archery, Luigi the Italian Explosives Expert (Robin Smith - who reminds me of the ruler of the Moulin Rogue! played by Jim Broadbent), and would-be evolution theorist Charles Darwin (Leo Bill) and his pet monkey Wallace. There is snide play with the characters for those familiar with the rival-collaboration between Darwin and Alfred Russell Wallace.
Throughout the told story, the characters are loosely perceived as looking like people Alexandria has seen before. The ominous henchmen are in a guise similar to the darkly glad X-Ray engineers who roam the hospital corridors. The Masked Bandit is originally played by Alexandria’s father (Emil Hostina) who is gap-toothed (Fun Fact: In Chaucer’s time, a woman with a gap-tooth possessed a sexy attribute.) until she informs Roy her dad is dead. For the duration of the story, the role of The Masked Bandit is played by Roy. Governor Odious, when revealed later, stands in as a rival of Roy’s, an otherwise humane man, whose depravity is greatly exaggerated.
Back in reality, about midway into the movie, it becomes clear that Roy’s cliffhangers are motivated by his need to persuade Alexandria to fetch him enough medicine to commit suicide with. Not only is Roy a handicap, he is trapped in the private hell of being deliriously in love with a woman who has given her heart to another man. Roy’s bouts of depression and utter pessimism first occasionally and then ultimately influence his fantasy world into darkness. There is a funny-sad scene where Roy is cobbling down Morphine pills, while Alexandria innocently picks up those he dropped so he can consume them.
Vivid and luridly odd costume design by Eiko Ishioka (Mishima, 1985) marks her second distinguishable collaboration with Tarsem after The Cell (2000). The fantasy sequences were shot in over two dozen counties in South America, Europe, Asia and Africa. Tarsem and cinematographer Colin Watkinson realize phenomenal visuals with wise framing and subtle dissolves placed creatively in strange architecture and landscapes. There is so little in the way of computer rendering that what looks gorgeous beyond reason is actually just photographed. The Voodoo of Location, a philosophy by German maverick Werner Herzog, is played out fruitfully as opposed to the tiresome green screen approach.
The Fall demonstrates my philosophy of The Authenticity of Light (trademark), a means of achieving visuals effects by hand and controlling real light while filming. The reality of the shot is grounded; manipulated before the camera and not after. The use of CGI, a reworking of pixels that carries no weight subconsciously, is an exercise of The Inauthenticity of Light (trademark). It is more exhilarating to realize an image that carries weight and is actually tactile in the real world. A stone is more valuable than a dream.
Tarsem and his composer Krishna Levy get great mileage out of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 7 in A major, Op. 92, II. Allegretto. This instrumental score hasn’t been used so effectively since its placement over the near-devastating finale of Gaspar Noé’s Irreversible (2002). It can also be heard over the scene in Stephen Herek’s Mr. Holland’s Opus (1995) where Mr. Holland (Richard Dreyfuss) lectures his class about Beethoven continuing to compose masterfully despite the loss of hearing. Meanwhile Mr. Holland can’t help but tearfully contemplate the loss of his own newborn son being deaf: “Well, Beethoven wasn’t born deaf”.
That music introduces and bookends The Fall beginning with a lusciously photographed sequence in black-and-white depicting the horrific aftermath of a stunt turned tragic. The compositions, its heightened values, and dreamy slow-motion capturing a rescue on train tracks suspended high over a body of water. The steam-engine train blows a long puff of bright white smoke against the warm gray sky like a man-made cloud. The last sequence is a montage of death-defying stunts accumulated from silent pictures starring Chaplin, Keaton, and Lloyd whom Alexandria figures must be Roy doing all that work.
The Fall is one of those rare films that doesn’t come to you, but you must come to it. It doesn’t fulfill the conventional needs we usually come to expect from a feature film. It comes bearing gifts you might not have prepared for. Remember that trailer for Julie Taymor’sAcross The Universethat promised us “the most original, exhilerating, spectacular, groundbreaking motion picture of the year!”The Fall, for the most part, actually capitalizes on that promise this year. Most people will turn away from it, the same who demand more originality in film and are shocked when they see something like The Fall. This one isn’t for everybody and that’s more reason to treasure it.
Bias Alert:This news comes just I have recently finished Michael Moore’s Election Guide 2008, thus having read every published word he has ever written including those from the obscureAdventures in a TV Nation.
That waskly old Liberal Michael Moore is rocking the vote (and the boat) with his new film Slackers Uprising. Much like in The Big One (1997) which chronicled Moore’s book tour for Downsize This!, this documentary follows Moore across the country’s universities and colleges. With young adults in attendance months before the Presidential Election of 2004, Moore beseeched the Slackers of America to find their shorts, scarf down their Fruit Loops sans milk and VOTE! The race was between Bush and Kerry and arguably over half the country felt the stakes were near-apocalyptic over four more years of the Sitting Duck in Office.
This caused some ridiculous controversy by the right-wing pundits who spoke out against Moore’s tactic. Now Moore didn’t outright demand to the twenty-somethings which candidate’s name they had to puncture in the ballot. What did Bill O’ “DO IT LIVE!” Reillyand the gang have to fear of young voters participating in their right to democracy. They could very well have stuck it to old man Kerry and gone back to suckling the warm, freedom-flavored teat of Dubya.
Starting September 23rd, Michael Moore is generously releasing his new film Slackers Uprising as a free download for three weeks in North America. As a Canadian, this cheers me greatly. Usually downloadable media from the US is unavailable to your Neighbor of the North - I’m looking at you NBC (30 ROCK), CBS (Swing Town) and Comedy Central (The Daily Show + Colbert Report)! Being the first mainstream film to reach personal computer screens for the admission of bupkis, Michael Moore is not only a pioneer but truely appreciates his fortune in turn by his audience: “This is being done entirely as a gift to my fans. The only return any of us are hoping for is the largest turnout of young voters ever at the polls in November.”
This may very well tip a close presidential race away from the Republican Party’s John ‘Hot Head’ McCain and that media-trashing, earmark-embracing hockey mom Sarah Palin.
A DVD of the said film will also be released. It’s Special Features include:
Special Guest Joan Baez – America the Beautiful
Diplomats and Military Commanders for Change
Why People Like George Bush?
My Pet Goat
The O’Reilly Factor for Kids
Oh, Canada (Oh, My!)
Just Add Water and Heat - More Ramen and Clean Underwear
Two years ago, Hungarian filmmaker György Pálfi made a darkly comic familial splatter film based on the short stories of absurdist writer Lajos Parti Nagy. A vomtorium that dissects the inner workings, obsessions, and gluttonous fetishes of the Kálmán’s past three generations. A timeline laced and dripped into the warm, spent human ooze from Dante’s Circles of Hell. This film Taxidermia (2006) sounds like John “Se7en” Doe’s cup of tea.
The three generations syndrome by German novelist Thomas Mann follows the scheme that the grandfather starts the family on its course, then his son, the father, raises the family to the pinnacle of success so that the last generation’s son would waste it and start anew.
Dutch, once upon a time English, filmmaker Peter Greenaway applied this three generation scheme to filmmaking and concluded that the bold grandfather of the cinema was D.W. Griffiths who made the first narrative-sophisticated feature film Birth of a Nation (1915) - a pity it is irredeemably racist. The renegade father of the cinema was Orson Welles who perfected the medium with the towering Citizen Kane (1939). Then the mutinousson of the cinema beingJean-Luc Godard broke and rearranged cinematic conventions by way of the French New Wave with Breathless (1960).
I was about to summarize the plot but I think the trailer does a better job than I ever could.
Fair warning: the trailer gets pretty freaky.
I really dig that smash cut with the crying rooster.
Here’s the international one: it’s quite vivid.
A round of applause for the sickly fascinating website with the droning music and the decadently gruesome images. When you get to the spinning pin wheel, click on the same image twice to navigate to a new link in the site. Montreal-based Brazilian musician/DJ Amon Tobin scores the film and it sounds subterranean.
I have not seen this film just yet, not for a lack of stomach mind you. I’d have gladly bought a DVD released by Tartan outside of North America had I not found out about the Hungarian produced two-disc special edition. It is packaged like a slab of meat wrapped in cellophane - “Cause you can look right through me. Walk right by me” (couldn’t help myself!) - sold in supermarket.
Disc One features the film in an anamorphic widescreen transfer with Dolby 2.0, Dolby 5.1 and DTS 5.1 soundtracks. Optional English subtitles are included. Supposedly there is a DVD version that includes a director’s commentary but is not included here.
Disc Two has a 42 minute production, 30 minutes of deleted scenes, with optional director’s commentary, 8-minute visual design and concept gallery, 3 minute stills gallery, Hungarian and International trailers, two music videos by the band Hollywoodoo, Taltosember vs Ikarus - a 20 minute short film by György Pálfi, storyboards, and an interactive game.
Unfortunately, the Hungarian retailers are keeping this DVD edition a secret from the rest of the world. Anyone who knows how I can get a copy of this special edition would be greatly appreciated.
Calling all agnostics, come November 5th have plenty of body armor on because the unapologetic documentary Religulous is hitting theaters. That all heart, brainy and quick-witted political commentator, Bill Maher, takes us around the world to prod people about that hot button called God. There’s already some right-wing evangelist backlash against it. One wonders if there will be a boycott for the likes of Kevin Smith’s underrated Dogma(1999). Thank (insert your diety here) there are people out there willing tackle the bully boys that ram literal readings of the Old Testament down our collective throats.
It’s funny how defensive some (er…most) people get when you even suggest plausible doubt that takes them out of their theological comfort zone. That’s what Maher is doing and I applaud him for it. Questioning is good for achieving a moderate and curious society. This keeps the threat of evangelical movements that want to conquer and not listen at bay. I know people who think that world peace would be realized had everyone become a devout Christian as well those (like John Lennon) who believe there would be no wars without religion. I think people will use any excuse to find prejudice and make enemies whether religion is existant or not because it is the easiest to exploit.
Now I believe in a healthy open mind. I’m willing to entertain the plausibility of a conscious and omnipresent being surrounding our wacky universe so long as others don’t deny that our surroundings are governed by scientific means. It would be just as depressing to have worldly people obliterate their personal beliefs and histories for a unified one decided by a majority as would the option of obliterating them altogether. What appeals to me about all religions, popular as well as obscure ones, are the imaginations and the varied identities made possible for individuals around the world. It would be downright boring to be so certain about one outcome. It only becomes a problem when others are harmed in the name of an idea.
Lions Gate is distributing Religulous. No surprise, this studio often releases heady and controversial films like Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004), The Passion of the Christ (2004), Hard Candy (2005), American Psycho (2000), and Shadow of the Vampire (2000), as well as Repetitive Vomitoriums and Spoofs For The Lobotomized.
Throughout Maher’s theological search, I’ll have time to muse why I find atheism so sexy.
My sister thought the man on the toast looked like Jeff Bridges.
