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  • Renner on ‘Jesse James’

    Jeremy Renner in The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert FordI’ve been sitting here transcribing an interview with “Hurt Locker” actor Jeremy Renner (watch for that later today or tomorrow) and came across a portion where we discussed 2007’s “The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford,” my pick for that year’s best film and one of the best of the decade.  I don’t imagine finding a place for it in the actual interview piece but I wanted to toss up Renner’s thoughts on the making of the film:

    Andrew Dominik is great with actors but it was one of the longest jobs I’ve had.  I feel like I could have shot anything I was in in probably a week and it could have been done but it was just stretched out for so long.  But the cast is phenomenal, riding horses and shooting guns, you get to play cowboys.  That’s a little boy’s dream come true if you ask me.  There were some moments shooting this thing when I was so bored out of my mind as an artist.  I was so unmotivated.  I’m sitting with Sam Rockwell and Sam Shepard and it’s probably three degrees outside and we’re shivering, it’s four in the morning, we’ve been out there for six hours, we haven’t done anything.  We have potato sacks on our heads.  We could be anybody!  What are we doing!  We were all just very frustrated as actors.  But then I went to the monitor and saw what they were shooting down below, and “Holy moly.”  It was just moving art.  Gorgeous.  Then I’m like, “Okay, I understand.  I’m glad to be a part of this process.”  Even though it didn’t do well in the box office I think that film is going to stand the test of time.  I was so happy to be a part of that.  Very blessed.

    By the way, does anyone watch Renner’s ABC series “The Unusuals?”  I don’t follow TV news too closely so I actually found out about the show’s unfortunate cancellation from Renner himself, but I have to say, it’s one of my favorites right now.  Too bad it wasn’t picked up for another season.

  • This year’s Best Picture category to feature 10 nominees

    OscarsThe headline says it all.  Is this some strange move on the Academy’s part to further dilute an already incredibly suspect process?  Or, more likely, is this a response to the outcry last year against critical favorites such as “The Dark Knight” and “WALL-E” missing the cut.  With 10 nominees, “the bubble” is all but eliminated and it’s a free-for-all.

    As exiting Academy president Sid Ganis puts it in the press release (see below), “Having 10 Best Picture nominees is going allow Academy voters to recognize and include some of the fantastic movies that often show up in the other Oscar categories, but have been squeezed out of the race for the top prize.”  I understand the desire to widen the net, considering the rather heated scrutiny the organization has received for some of its nominee choices, but is this the answer?

    Of course, the way the release puts it, the AMPAS wants to “go back to some of its earlier roots,” back when the 10 nominees was the norm.  But that was 70 years ago.  Additionally, this raises a whole other slate of questions as it regards competition and Oscar advertising.  With consistent awards budget cuts, a move like this could be seen as a breath of fresh air for studios stifled by the competition.  Then again, it could open the door for even more campaign dollars.  Is a “Star Trek” Best Picture push suddenly viable?  But the fact remains, with a widened winner’s circle comes a vacuum where being distinguished is concerned.

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  • Aronofsky at Edinburgh

    Darren AronofskyAs someone who prefers watching movies to listening to others talk about them, I probably haven’t attended as many of the In Person Q&A sessions at this year’s Edinburgh festival as I should have. Sam Mendes lost out in my priority scale to “The Red Shoes,” while the likes of Bill Forsyth and Brenda Blethyn (whose award-caliber work in “London River” I discussed yesterday) passed me by.

    I did, however, catch Darren Aronofsky’s career discussion earlier this week, and a most entertaining couple of hours it was. It wasn’t quite clear why Aronofsky was at the festival, given that he had nothing new to present – perhaps he also simply fancied a chance to kick back and watch a few movies in a picturesque town. (Earlier in the day, I had found myself seated behind him at the “Antichrist” screening – he didn’t look quite as impressed as I was.)

    As with the last time I saw Aronofsky speak, when presenting “The Wrestler” in London, the filmmaker’s interview style is largely too chatty and anecdotal to relate in writing – for the most part, I simply dropped my notepad and enjoyed the patter. The interviewer (whose name, I’m embarrassed to admit, escapes me at this moment, though I can confirm she was both gracious and very well-versed) reasoned that “The Wrestler” was still fairly fresh in the audience’s mind, so the conversation mainly flowed around Aronofsky’s first three features.

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  • “There was something…really dark about me.”

    Marion Cotillard in Public EnemiesWhat is beautiful/sexy anyway these days?  Is classic back in?  Does bombshell still register?  Who knows, but for me, very much so lately, actress Marion Cotillard seems to be a certain embodiment.

    A taste thing, obviously.  Subjective.  But I put her near the head of the pack in a business so hung up on boiler-plate image that it tends to miss gems like Cotillard.  Fortunately, thanks to an Oscar and prime film gigs, audiences Stateside are making her introduction.

    It is with these, perhaps overly dude-ish thoughts that I read Heather Hudson’s unique profile of the actress in London’s Daily Telegraph newspaper.  Painting a portrait of depth at the very top of the piece, Hudson begins to capture a quite complicated, attractively thoughtful actress.  The writer details a “propensity for complicated emotion” and conversations concerning “intrinsic worth” that absolutely captivates.  Or maybe it’s just another crush.

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  • Tell us what you thought of ‘Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen’

    Megan Fox in Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen

    The midnight showings have come and gone and the matinees are firing up today, so let’s do this.  You’ll forgive the perceivably crude image choice, but this is a film that demands that kind of treatment.  And hey, that’s what these things are about, right?  I’ve already offered a mini-opinion of the film, but have your say below.  Tell us what you thought of what is likely to be the year’s big box office champion.

  • Wells on ‘Enemies’

    Michael Mann’s Public Enemies, which premiered last night in Westwood, is glorious and levitational — the most captivating, beautifully composed and freshly conceived gangster movie since Bonnie and Clyde. It’s an art film first, a Mann head-and-heart trip second, a classic machine-gun action pulverizer third, and a conventional popcorn movie fourth. The schmucks will go “meh” and the people who are hip enough to understand what this movie is doing/has done will retire to tens of thousands of nearby cafes and talk it over for at least a couple of hours.

    The rest (though there’s not much — no full review) here.

  • Miyazaki’s ‘Ponyo’ US trailer

    I’ll write more about “Ponyo” when the film closes the LA fest next week.  For now, we’ve got a new trailer (that I’ve been rather slow to post).  I imagine most Miyazaki devotees will be head-over-heels in love with this thing.  I don’t count myself in their ranks, though I have the utmost respect for the filmmaker’s uncompromising imagination.

  • 6/23 Web Round-up

    Alfred Hitchcock in The Birds• 10 things action movies teach us. [CNN]

    • And if you’re still in the mood for some learnin’, 10 insights on today’s film business. [indieWIRE]

    • Breezing through Alfred Hitchcock’s 36 film cameos. [Empire]

    • Coolest remake idea of the decade? [Associated Press]

    • Looking back through the works of Sam Mendes. [/Film]

    • David Lynch dives headlong into “The Interview Project” with son Austin. [Moviemaker]

    • A fond farewell to analog television. [Time]

    • Jennie Yabroff chats with “Hurt Locker” director Kathryn Bigelow. [Newsweek]

  • EDINBURGH: “35 Shots of Rum,” “Séraphine,” “The Maid”

    35 Shots of RumTuesday was a day of mellower pleasures at the Edinburgh Film Festival, from an idle sun-soaked writing break in the park, to a chance conversation with Paddy Considine and Shane Meadows (both as smart and affably bloke-ish as you’d expect) outside the theater, to, most importantly, a trio of quietly impressive, character-oriented foreign-language titles.

    Two of them — France’s “Séraphine” and Chile’s “The Maid” — were decorated earlier this year with glittering prizes from the Césars and Sundance, respectively. Typically, the strongest of the three (and one of the best of the festival, not to mention the year) comes with no such accolades, having played inexplicably out of competition at Venice last year.

    35 SHOTS OF RUM (***1/2)

    Call it coincidence, but the finest films of this year’s festival have all come from the hands of female filmmakers. However, if Andrea Arnold’s and Kathryn Bigelow’s new efforts found them substantially broadening their canvases to knockout effect, “35 Shots of Rum” (which also played last night at the LA Film Fest across the pond) is an immaculate miniature from a master filmmaker; wispy at first glance, the film deftly accumulates tiny environmental and character details to create a richly satisfying tableau of restless lives.

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  • REVIEW: “Public Enemies” (***1/2)

    Public EnemiesLos Angeles Film Festival

    There is a moment very early in Michael Mann’s “Public Enemies,” featured today as the centerpiece exhibition of the Los Angeles Film Festival, when Depression-era criminal John Dillinger (Johnny Depp) stares into the dying eyes of friend and mentor Walter Dietrich (James Russo) as his band of cohorts flees the scene of a somewhat botched prison escape attempt. The sequence is at once curiously beautiful and unmistakably somber, of a piece with the filmmaker’s coldly calculated vision of a man caught up in the freedom of his rebellious lifestyle, yet haunted by the specter of his own obsolescence.

    The film marks an exciting return to muscular, patient storytelling form for Mann. After dubious stabs at commercial appeal in “Collateral” and “Miami Vice,” films that certainly have followers and admittedly plumb thematic depths no other filmmaker would have reached, the director has painted his most resonant character study since 1995’s “Heat.”

    Headlined by an emotive, at times unsettlingly internalized performance by Depp, the film amplifies Mann’s penchant for nuance while marrying it with a well-exercised gift for staging unique if not inimitable action set pieces. But for all the director’s classic cinematic accoutrement, the film nevertheless stands apart from Mann’s portfolio for its fully realized vision of a doomed romance highlighted by, rather than merely peripheral to, the machismo on display.

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  • 2009’s Oscar drought…same old song and dance

    Michael Caine in Is Anybody There?Over at Variety, newly minted editor-in-chief Tim Gray writes what we’ve been mentioning around these parts for a while: the first half of the 2009 film year is decidedly bereft of anything that might be deemed “Oscar-worthy” come January 2010.

    Aside from “Star Trek” and “Up,” the recognized critical faves of the year thus far, the best films I have seen are Kathryn Bigelow’s “The Hurt Locker,” Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck’s “Sugar,” Duncan Jones’s “Moon” and Michael Mann’s “Public Enemies,” but I expect only two of those could stir the awards pot.

    Critics have also responded, intriguingly, to Sam Raimi’s “Drag Me to Hell,” but I think we all know it’s safe to strike that one from the awards roster.  And Focus Features’ “Coraline” is likely to make an impact on the animated feature race, but beyond that, you’d be hard-pressed to offer much in the way of a solid list as we approach the mid-way point.

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  • Toronto announces 26 titles for this year’s fest

    TorontoToronto International Film Festival programmers announced today that they are bringing home the circuit with a group of titles scheduled for the fest that have played previously at other festivals, including Cannes, Berlin and beyond. They will all be North American premieres, spread across several of the festival’s programs.

    In the Masters Program we will have “The Eccentricities of a Blond Haired Girl” from director Manoel de Oliveira, celebrating his 101st birthday this year, and still at work. From Alain Resnais we have “Les Herbes Folles,” a romantic adventure built around the loss of a wallet, and Hirokazu Kore-eda brings us his Japanese film, “Air Doll,” in which a blow-up comes to life and tries to find her way in the real world, leaving behind her role as a sex toy.

    The Discovery Program will give us “Gigante,” a love story from director Adrian Biniez, “The Happiest Girl in the World,” a comedy from Radu Jude, and the love story, “Kelin” from Kazakhstan. Australian director Warwick Thomas gives us “Samson and Delilah,” the tale of a young couple treated as outsiders as they live in an aboriginal community.

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  • Before the ‘Transformers’ slaughter…

    Transformers: Revenge of the FallenEmbargoes have long since crashed, but the mauling is still to come.  And though I don’t feel compelled to write a review of “Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen,” I do feel it a strange duty to get off at least one or two positive remarks before tomorrow’s inevitable critical massacre.

    The film is better than the first.  The film makes great comedic use of actors Kevin Dunn and Julie White, almost begging for a sitcom spin-off.  The film’s action is creative and exciting, more fun than it had any right to be.  The kitsch is embraced with less apology than the first film, which takes the movie to this weird artistic level that I can’t even begin to place.

    There is a shot that will most definitely make it through to my annual “shots of the year” piece.   On that score, there are, in fact, more interesting cinematic ideas in the film than you’d expect.  Shia LaBeouf actually gives a damn good performance (seriously).  Megan Fox is filmed with delirious invasion to the point that it almost becomes commentary.  The “twins” that draw claims of racism could be strangely viewed as a separate commentary, on pop culture, given where the Autobots claim to have learned human communication.  And the material proves, once again, to be sound mixing and sound editing pornography.

    But…the movie sucks.  And that it can be all of those things and still manage to be worthless on so many levels is absolutely amazing to me.  Michael Bay is another breed.  Dare I say that deserves cherishing?

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  • Tim Burton’s ‘Batman’ — 20 years later

    BatmanThere is a reason I am such an embarrassingly devoted Batman fan.

    It’s not because I’m a life-long comic book reader.  That came later.  And it’s not because I grew up watching reruns of the old ABC television series.  Though I certainly did.  It’s because Tim Burton’s “Batman,” released in theaters 20 years ago today, was the first movie that truly owned my anticipatory faculties as a child.  It was the first film that lit my movie-going fire, a designation saved for “Star Wars,” “Indiana Jones” and “E.T.” a generation prior and perhaps “Jurassic Park” and Harrison Ford’s actioners a generation later.

    In the simplest of terms, I wouldn’t be a film obsessive if it weren’t for “Batman.”  I owe it so much.

    For me, the film was an event not to be missed.  I remember watching the commercials flood prime time television: the howling of a Batwing circling a Gothic cathedral, the quips of an actor I knew from comedy somehow tapped to play a brooding character of purpose, “Where does he get those wonderful toys?,” etc.

    The Anton Furst-designed logo was everywhere, seared into immortality by any production that happened to film in Times Square in the summer of 1989, decorating untold numbers of hats and T-shirts, the winged image an absolute specter hanging over the march to June 23.

    And then, finally, the release.

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  • EDINBURGH: ‘London River,’ ‘Spread’

    London RiverThe past day has presented me with two films that made their first appearances at high-profile festivals early in the year: Scottish auteur David Mackenzie’s first U.S. effort “Spread” — a “look ma, I can act” venture of sorts for Ashton Kutcher — played at Sundance in January, while Rachid Bouchareb’s “London River” was a favorite (and an award-winner) at February’s Berlinale. Suffice to say that winter festival bows are all these titles have in common.

    LONDON RIVER (***)

    American filmmakers have been combing the ashes of 9/11 for inspiration for some years now, but the British have been far more reticent in taking the London bombings of July 2005. Indeed, it has fallen to Algerian director Rachid Bouchareb (a recent Oscar nominee for his excellent WWII drama “Days of Glory”) to make the first major fictional exploration of this territory, and happily he doesn’t fumble the catch by presuming importance.

    The story of two culturally opposed parents (an impoverished Francophone Muslim and a middle-class British widow) who travel to the eponymous city after the attacks, in search of their missing children, “London River” infuses a standard-issue story of parental grief with social and racial tensions that mine the Western suspicion of Islam that has become commonplace in the wake of 9/11. (“The place is crawling with Muslims!” Brenda Blethyn’s culturally sheltered rural character exclaims about London, in one of the film’s few stabs at humor.)

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  • REVIEW: “Antichrist” (***1/2)

    AntichristEdinburgh International Film Festival

    “I am the greatest director in the world,” Lars von Trier declared in an already notorious Cannes press conference following the unveiling of “Antichrist” in May.  Unable to resist such shameless baiting, most critics either responded with affectionate exasperation (“Oh, Lars!”) or, as one suspects von Trier preferred, tomato-faced indignation.

    What few did, however, was entertain the possibility that he might be telling the truth. It’s a conclusion that, even on the imperfect evidence of “Antichrist,” this viewer is willing to consider.

    Few contemporary filmmakers are as adept at arousing feeling as Lars von Trier – by which I refer not merely to the ingenious media-provocateur act he performs to market his work, but the actual excesses and polarities of emotion he mines within his own cinema.

    Von Trier’s best films arouse equal measures of devotion and resentment because they engage human empathy with no concessions whatsoever to conventional artistic standards of restraint or good taste; like their psychologically frail heroines – Bess in “Breaking the Waves,” Selma in “Dancer in the Dark,” Grace in “Dogville” – they teeter on the brink of self-destruction simply because they feel too much.

    I must slightly temper that argument upfront by admitting that “Antichrist,” as mercurial and bruising as it so often is, is not one of von Trier’s very best. Though it by and large meets the criteria described above – and its unnamed anti-heroine is a fascinating, near-parodic amalgamation of physical traits and psychological symptoms from all the director’s women – it lacks the emotional breadth of “Breaking the Waves,” or the formal and ideological conviction of “Dogville.” Unusually for von Trier, for all the film’s sledgehammer brutality in its concluding chapters, it’s rather coy about what it actually wants to say.

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  • R.I.P. Ed McMahon

    Ed McMahonOn one hand, I’d be lying if I didn’t say one of the first things that crossed my mind with the sad news of Ed McMahon’s passing was, “He was still alive?”  Indeed, McMahon, a fixture of my childhood, hadn’t exactly planted a flag of relevance on my life for a number of years, but nevertheless, it’s kind of a punch to the gut to wake up to this kind of thing.

    He was Johnny Carson’s “Tonight Show” sidekick, holding down the couch night after night throughout my youth.  He was the “Star Search” guy, a benevolent figure to a number of today’s entertainers as they got their first big break.  He was the guy you hoped to open the door to with a giant Publisher’s Clearing House envelope in tow.  And, of course, he had his hand in the movie business.

    He was all these things, yes.  He was an American staple.  He wasn’t an artist whose genius will never spark again, but something perhaps a little more.  He was a figment of the entertainment business whose likeness is gone forever and whose passing marks, poetically in league with the recent programming particulars at NBC, the end of an era.

    Here’s a clip for nostalgia.  You don’t get this brand of classic comedy on late night anymore.  Maybe on Letterman from time to time:

  • THE LISTS: Top 10 directorial debuts of the decade

    JimMyron Ross in BallastTo me, “great cinema” means something I haven’t seen before or something I have seen before presented in a new way. With 110 years of motion pictures behind us, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to meet those standards, especially since filmmakers find it a lot easier to give in to preconceived notions of story structure, character arcs and tidy resolutions than to try and present something truly unique on the screen. So more often than not, when something new comes along, a new filmmaker unhinged to big money or heavy reputations is brought along with it.

    Actually researching the titles eligible for inclusion made me realize just how few great debut films there really are, let alone in this decade. Most great filmmakers needed at least one title or two to really get their bearings straight. M. Night Shyamalan, Christopher Nolan, Michel Gondry, David Fincher and Alexander Payne all come to mind. Not everyone can be Spike Jonze after all.

    That said, there’s also something amazing and beautiful about catching an artist at their most raw and naïve. Often, the only way to rewrite the rulebook is to be unaware that you are breaking any rules in the first place. When it comes to art, the line between genius and stupidity can be nearly invisible. For example, a film that came close to making this list was “Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgandy.” Less a movie than a patchwork of scenes and caricatures, Adam McKay clearly had no specific vision for this thing since an entire second movie was constructed out of deleted scenes. But what he came up with benefits from a legitimate sense of anarchy that isn’t present in any of his or Will Ferrell’s subsequent work. And from Chaplin and Keaton to Johnny Knoxville and Sacha Baron Cohen, the cornerstone of great comedy has been anarchy.

    Let’s get the obvious out of the way. This list may be a bit premature as there are six whole months left for some obnoxiously talented filmmaker to set my world on fire with their debut work and I’m denying him or her a rightful spot on this list. Well, what are you gonna do? It’s not like I’ve seen all the films eligible for inclusion released up until this point anyway. I’m taking my chances. And before I get stick in the comments, believe me, I was surprised and disappointed that no foreign film made the list. It’s not that I didn’t see many; it’s just that I didn’t see any that deserved it. And yes, I’ve seen “Amores Perros.”

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