Michael Wood on Spider-Man 3 in the new LRB
5/22/2007 5:00:00 PM
Michael Wood, the house movie reviewer for the London Review of Books, has just issued his report on Spider-Man 3, which begins, "Money talks, but it doesn’t write all that well, and it can scarcely direct a movie at all."
As you may guess, Mr. Wood doesn't like Spider-Man 3 all that much, but his reasoning is nuanced. Speaking of the contrast between Peter Parker and his alter ego, Wood writes, "We might feel sorry for him if he weren’t so jovially expert at feeling sorry for himself, and we don’t really connect the athletic figure swinging through the city streets at great heights with the abstracted and uncertain Peter Parker on his underpowered motorbike." Later in the review, in an attempt to reconcile this, and reconcile his high regard with the first two films with the new one, summarizes the unmasking scene in the subway car in 2 and the vow of secrecy that PP elicits from the crowd, concluding, "This is loyal of them, and they think they are being loyal to the boy. In reality they are being loyal to the myth. Spider-Man has to be nobody. That’s why he is no real help to Peter Parker."
Wood says that No. 3 is "more of a mess than you can quite believe. Pieces of plot float in from nowhere, supernatural characters develop new sets of powers in mid-scene, all the most soppy and obvious scenes are played as if they were Ibsen and all the jokes have been replaced by weary memories of what the movies used to be like."
As intellectuals often do, Wood turns to the disparity between money and quality, with the masses throwing their money at bad things. "Spider-Man performed well at the box office, but Spider-Man 2, by far the most interesting of the three, did poorly. Why do I wish the critical lessons of history were not so obvious?" Spider-Man became, at least for the moment, "the most successful new film release in history," and Wood concludes that "Sam Raimi, the director of all three Spider-Man movies, can rest on his financial laurels, especially since in this case he and his writers did scarcely any work to earn them."
— DK Holm
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Down in the Dark: Video Watchdog Issue No. 130
5/22/2007 4:15:00 PM
Having finally sent his massive book on Mario Bava off to its printers, Tim Lucas has now returned to a monthly schedule for Video Watchdog, and the current issue is hitting the stores (four pages of the issue offered as a teaser are available online). Highlights include an extended obit for Freddie Francis by Ted Newsom, a disturbingly pro-studio oriented account of Bill Gunn's renowned blaxploitation vampire film Ganja and Hess by All Day Entertainment's David Kalat, and a survey of the Boris Karloff Collection by Kim Newman. Among the numerous DVD reviews are Brad Stevens's on an import of Emir Kusturica's Arizona Dream, starring Johnny Depp and Jerry Lewis. The magazine recently started running HD and Blu-Ray reviews, and in this issue Sam and Rebecca Umland take a look at Forbidden Planet. Book reviews, often the most interesting part of an issue, cover books on film adaptations of Arthur Conan Doyle, masked wrestler movies, and a new book about the Friday the 13th series. Finally, horror writer Ramsey Campbell offers up an essay on Gaspar Noë's Irreversible. Calling him "France's greatest living exploitation filmmaker," Campbell goes on to write that "Noë's ambition appears to be to discomfort us as much as possible, not just with his material," adding that in one interview, "he claimed he was happy to make some of the audience leave. This ambition may sound like Michael Haneke, but rather than sharing Haneke's lofty didactic superiority to the audience, Noë is down there with us in the dark."
— DK Holm
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Cannes Report: D’Angelo Reviews The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
5/22/2007 3:15:00 PM
Sometimes the gulf between hardcore cineastes and the rest of the movie-watching world seems so vast as to be truly unbridgeable. A few years ago, Alejandro Amenábar's The Sea Inside, starring Javier Bardem as a paraplegic fighting for the right to commit suicide, captivated festival audiences in multiple countries and took home the Oscar for Best Foreign Film — which rather surprised me and my film-buff friends, since we'd all dismissed it as maudlin, heavy-handed swill. Julian Schnabel's superficially similar The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, based on the memoir by French journalist Jean-Dominique Bauby, doesn't pluck at the heartstrings quite so clumsily or insistently, but I was still startled — will I never learn? — to pick up the trades this afternoon* and discover that it's being hailed as brilliant, stunning, the new Palme d'Or frontrunner. Really? In a festival delectably top-heavy with the radical and the visionary, this mundane paean to the indomitable human spirit is what gets everyone all fired up?
That said, I'm grateful that Schnabel eventually ditches his most unorthodox device and settles into a more conventional visual rhythm. Bauby, who at the time of his cerebrovascular stroke was the Paris editor of Elle, awakens from a coma only to find himself completely paralyzed; for two full reels — nearly 40 minutes of screen time — we see the world exclusively from his stationary vantage point. Schnabel clearly wants us to feel as trapped as his afflicted hero, but the first-person camera style is so unnatural that it invariably comes across as a gimmick; once the film begins to alternate between interior and exterior views, time spent inside Bauby's diving bell becomes far more affecting.
As I said, the film was adapted from Bauby's memoir, and nobody with an ounce of empathy could fail to be moved by the true story of its painstaking creation, as Bauby dictates the entire book one character at a time, listening as his stenographer (Anne Consigny) recites the alphabet (in order of frequency in the French language) and blinking his left eyelid — the only muscle in his control — to indicate that she's reached the letter he wants. Schnabel was also wise to cast Mathieu Amalric, with his unusually expressive and already slightly bulging eyes, as Bauby — the disjunction between his sarcastic and penetrating thoughts (heard in voiceover) and his imploring, stricken gaze is genuinely heartrending. Still, it's the real-life story, not the artistry involved in its telling, that does all the heavy lifting here. All Schnabel does is avoid screwing it up.
— Mike D’Angelo
* How am I reading the trades without stumbling onto information about the remaining Competition films, followers of the Wack Experiment may wonder? It's too laborious to explain, really, but the key words are "peripheral vision." Basically, I can see at a blurry glance which pages are safe (the review section, though I have to avoid the ads) and which aren't. This is also how I navigate the streets without catching sight of billboards.
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When Good Directors Go Bad: THE SERPENT’S EGG (dir. Ingmar Bergman, 1977)
5/22/2007 2:30:00 PM
One of the eccentricities of American film distribution prior to the rise of the Internet was that the majority of foreign films released on our shores tended to be at least passable. Releasing movies in the U.S. isn’t cheap, and the audience for foreign films is more likely to put stock in movie reviews than people who just watch Hollywood blockbusters. As such, movie distributors historically have bought only the better-reviewed foreign titles, since they’re easier to market to their given audience. In light of this, the near-universal acclaim afforded to celebrated foreign directors of yore makes sense, since all but the most well-traveled critic wasn’t subjected to the directors’ lesser movies.
Such was the case with Ingmar Bergman, who has been one of the titans of world cinema for the past half-century. Bergman became a kind of hero to the cinema-literate audiences of the fifties, sixties and seventies with his stark chamber dramas. In these films, he perfected a probing style that became recognizable even to audiences who had never actually seen one of his movies. In fact, many viewers came to Bergman’s style secondhand, having first seen it referenced or even parodied by everyone from Woody Allen to television sketch comedy shows. Bergman, in addition to being a gifted filmmaker, was also a prolific one, producing in his career as many great or near-great films as any director before or since. Personally, I’ve seen roughly two dozen Bergman movies, and until recently I was fortunate enough to say that I’d never seen a bad one. Then I watched The Serpent’s Egg, a listless movie that seems to lack a reason for being. Not only does it feel like Bergman had no point in making this movie, it hardly feels like a Bergman movie at all.
The Serpent’s Egg is set in Berlin in 1923, during the desperate days of Germany’s Weimar Republic. With Germany’s defeat in World War I came economic collapse, and with it widespread poverty, unemployment, and hunger. The deutsche mark was almost worthless, the rate of exchange being millions or even billions of marks for every American dollar. Likewise, crime and amorality were rampant, with the city’s cabarets and brothels providing what little respite there was from the harsh realities of the times.
 | | Ingmar Bergman |
So far, this seems a promising setting for one of Bergman’s psychological dramas. After all, here was a director who had previously mined great drama from the corrupted morality of the Middle Ages in films like The Seventh Seal. Unfortunately, Bergman for some reason or other felt the need to cram as much plot as possible into The Serpent’s Egg. Narrative has never been a particular strength of Bergman’s — most of his best work is less concerned with providing the audience with a conventional story structure than it is with placing his characters inside a dramatic situation to test their reactions to it. However, The Serpent’s Egg is so bogged down with twists and turns that it practically forgets its characters altogether.
The result is a movie that comes off not so much as a Bergman film as one of the rash of paranoid thrillers that came out during the mid-seventies. In the course of the film, protagonist David Carradine has done or witnessed the following — his brother’s suicide, accusations of murder, a gang of street thugs, anti-Semitism, an attempt to flee a police interrogation, a cabaret raided by uniformed officers, the killing of his dead brother’s ex-wife, and a Nietzsche-esque doctor who performs extreme psychological experiments on poor volunteers. In addition, several characters speak of the threat of the upstart Hitler, who at the time was marshaling forces to the South preparing to take over the nation. All of these elements might make for a perfectly serviceable suspense film, but Bergman’s direction is too sluggish to generate suspense.
I can only assume then that Bergman’s goal in making The Serpent’s Egg was to explore the effect of Weimar-era Berlin on his characters. The trouble is that the characters aren’t seen with enough depth for this to be possible. Carradine’s character, Abel Rosenberg, is mostly reactive, but his reactions rarely illuminate his nature, and Bergman falls back on the cliché of making him an alcoholic in reaction to the times. That’s just lazy writing right there, and I personally expect more than that from Bergman.
Part of the problem was Carradine himself. The Serpent’s Egg was one of Bergman’s few forays into English-language filmmaking, and he had a somewhat larger budget than usual for the film, which would require an American star to justify. Despite having starred in Bound For Glory the previous year, Carradine was still best known as an action star, and he’s out of his depth in Bergman’s world. Carradine is a talented actor, but here — as in most of his roles — he projects a Zen-like coolness that feels out of sorts with his character’s presumed anguish. He’s more at home in the scenes that require him to give a more physical performance, but since Bergman’s heart really isn’t in these scenes, they don’t amount to much. Supposedly Bergman had originally offered the role to Dustin Hoffman, who might have made a better fit with the director, or at the very least would have put forth more of an effort. It might have seemed odd that an actor as adventurous as Hoffman was back in the day would have turned down a filmmaker of Bergman’s caliber, but having seen the finished film, I’m guessing he turned down the role because he read the script.
But if Bergman newcomer Carradine seems out of place, how to explain Liv Ullmann? Ullmann had been a major collaborator of Bergman’s for years, but in The Serpent’s Egg she mostly flounders around in search of a character to play. Her character arc is so disjointed that only a few hours after finding out about the death of her ex-husband Max, she is smiling and laughing again, as though she’s completely forgotten the bad news. Later in the film, Ullmann’s grief begins to manifest itself from time to time as physical illness, but by that time she has so firmly been established as a simpering fool that her belated pain barely registers. Roughly halfway through the film, Bergman makes his most concerted attempt to create a Bergman-esque scene, in which Ullmann pays a visit to an American priest played by James Whitmore, but it plays out so quickly that all I could think of was how much more impact the scene might have had (a) had I actually given a shit about the people onscreen, and (b) had Bergman actually allowed the scene to play out at length rather than rushing through it to get to another half-assed plot twist.
The Serpent’s Egg is a complete mess, a film that alternates between being boring and risible, with a major culprit being the film’s dialogue. Watching the film, it’s clear that English wasn’t Bergman’s strongest language, and his writing suffers for it. One of the most blatant examples of this is the occasional use of voiceover that Bergman uses. At the beginning of the film, the narrator says: “The scene is Berlin, the evening of Saturday, November 3, 1923. A pack of cigarettes costs four billion marks, and most everyone has lost faith in both the future and the present.” Now that’s just lazy writing. Perhaps he didn’t think we’d be clued in by the following scene, in which Carradine climbs the steps of his hotel to find the body of his brother, who has just shot himself in the head?
Two more equally egregious examples also spring to mind. First, Carradine wakes up in Ullmann’s apartment, the morning after his brother’s suicide. He is hung over, and Ullmann tries to comfort him, but he says, “I wake up from a nightmare and find that real life is worse than the dream.” And then there’s an encounter he had late in the film with a prostitute. As she tries to drum herself up some business, he tells her to go to hell, to which she responds, “but can’t you see we’re already there?”
 | | Dino De Laurentiis |
By the time he made The Serpent’s Egg, Bergman was well-established as one of the world’s great directors. However, he had some other problems to deal with in his personal life, having fled his native Sweden after being hounded by tax authorities. He arrived in Hollywood looking for funding for new projects, and he found a benefactor in uber-producer Dino De Laurentiis, who occasionally produced other prestige projects but was mostly known for expensive schlock, such as the previous year’s remake of King Kong. De Laurentiis gave the filmmaker a budget larger than Bergman was used to working with, and he shot the film in West Berlin.
But while the air of paranoia and government corruption that permeates The Serpent’s Egg may have resulted from Bergman’s personal woes, the film as a whole is as sterile and uninspired as anything the director has ever made. Thankfully, Bergman soon got his tax problems cleared up, and he was able to return to Sweden and his filmmaking comfort zone, his reputation still relatively unscathed. I would only recommend The Serpent’s Egg to Bergman completists, as an example of how even the most gifted directors are capable of producing subpar work. After all, even geniuses are mortal.
— Paul Clark
Previous When Good Directors Go Bad columns:
- May 8, 2007 -- 1941 (Steven Spielberg, 1979)
- May 1, 2007 -- EXORCIST II: THE HERETIC (John Boorman, 1977)
- April 24, 2007 -- READY TO WEAR (Robert Altman, 1994)
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Who’s In It and Who Are They F*cking? Notes on a Runaway Celebrity Culture
5/22/2007 1:45:00 PM
With celebrity culture at a fever pitch and showing no signs of cooling, it is clear that never before have we known more about the people playing the characters we see on screen. Now, gossip about actors is nothing new. People have wanted to know about the private lives of public players even before the invention of movies. And the so-called Golden Age of American Cinema was full of fascination and obsession with celebs: whether it was Humphrey Bogart marrying a 19 year old Lauren Bacall, Elizabeth Taylor and an endless string of husbands or any of countless reasons to put Marlon Brando in a headline, everybody knew a little controversy sparks curiosity and sells tickets. But let’s face it, nowadays we’ve become saturated. At some point the rampant interest in what stars do in their downtime crossed over from magazine profiles or Page Six gossip fodder into something much more pervasive, and that growing presence is now affecting who and what we see onscreen.
With the release of Georgia Rule last week, I challenge you to find a single review that doesn’t mention Lindsay Lohan’s now notorious and well-documented not-so-private life referenced as if it was part of her resume.
The thrill of seeing on-screen evidence of off-screen sparks may have been one of the only justifiable reasons for seeing the awful Mr. and Mrs. Smith and come opening weekend people bought $50M worth of tickets to do just that. On the flip side of the same story, Jennifer Aniston and Vince Vaughn’s The Break-Up certainly benefited at the box office from tabloid publicity. But is there any denying that Brad Pitt, despite a credible performance, was nothing more than a distraction in Babel simply because of who he is? Is anyone else going to have a hard time imagining Angelina Jolie as Marianne Pearl in the upcoming Daniel Pearl biopic by Michael Winterbottom? Brad Pitt as Jesse James is exciting and Angelina as Lara Croft doesn’t bother me either, but at this point don’t we just know too much to buy into them as characters we’re supposed to place within real life?
Kirsten Dunst has proven herself to be a relatively talented actress and an interesting screen presence; she might have continued to be perceived this way if not for being an almost daily target of bloggers for her sloppy personal style and what is deemed as her general unworthiness of being a star. Would we not have a different impression if we had only known the charming actress from The Virgin Suicides and Marie Antoinette instead of having to reconcile that with the braless slob going to Starbucks in what looks like the clothes she slept in?
These same publications can’t get enough of Jessica Alba and Jessica Biel to the point where they literally publish photos of them walking their dogs. But aside from a rope twirling, hip swirling scene in Sin City neither actress has much on their resume worth bragging about despite repeated attempts to place them in lead roles hoping to capitalize on their overall “hotness.”
And it’s not just the women… Will we ever be able to see a trailer for a Matthew McConaughey movie again without thinking of him doing some absurd calisthenics on the beach with his shirt off? Will Jake Gyllenhall ever escape the Brokeback captions? Whether or not Alec Baldwin’s cell phone tirade directed at his daughter has a positive or negative effect on his career is yet to be seen, but people will be hard pressed to forget it.
Sienna Miller’s affair with Jude Law catapulted her overnight into the world’s consciousness, and despite her open battle with the paparazzi her regular presence on their pages has surely given her access to roles she may only have dreamed about as one of a thousand other cute actresses.
But this process can just as easily work in reverse. Look at Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes, whose private lives have had a decidedly negative effect on what they can do professionally. Cruise is still a bankable movie star and a Hollywood powerhouse but MI:III posted some of the lowest numbers of his career (it still did very, very well) and many were quick to point the finger at backlash related to his increasingly strange personal life. Katie Holmes went from being a harmlessly cute, if not especially talented actress to the wife/prisoner of Cruise the Scientologist and now that’s all anyone can see. After her last role in Batman Begins so many of the reviews (and fan comments) focused on her poor performance that she was replaced in the sequel by Maggie Gyllenhall.
The power of the movie star in America has perhaps never been greater, and these days people go to see movies as much for curiosity about a film’s star and to add to their mental fantasy reel as anything to do with the movie itself. But even the movie star is no match for the all-encompassing power of the internet or more specifically the digital camera. Never before have we had such wide and immediate access to celebrities. We at Screengrab have trouble getting comments posted outside of our own circle even when we openly solicit them, but go to any of these gossip sites and you’ll find hundreds of anonymous, self-appointed experts willing to discuss anything but what an actor or actress does on screen. Unless of course you’re talking about a celebrity sex tape…
Part of an actor’s appeal used to be a certain mystique, but that seems to be disappearing thanks to America’s obsession with celebrity profiling. Of course there are still actors that keep to themselves. You don’t wake up and read about Robert DeNiro on PerezHilton.com and I can’t remember seeing a single item about Cate Blanchett. But increasingly with high profile roles in movies you now have the baggage of all the other characters the actor has played added to being the star of their own lives weighing against the possibility of losing yourself in a good performance. I’m not naïve enough to think that this trend is going to reverse itself, and I’m guilty of visiting some of these sites myself, but even without seeking them out some of these things just permeate the culture, like it or not. I may wish Kirsten Dunst was a little more of a mystery but honestly would we still be talking about Lindsay Lohan the actress if there was no such thing as Lindsay Lohan the celebrity? These are the times in which we live…
— Bryan Whitefield
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Salvador Dali’s Sense of Cinema (and a Video of the Day)
5/22/2007 1:00:00 PM
The modern artist most closely linked with the early days of motion pictures, Salvador Dali had a very distinctive conception of what film should be: He saw its strengths as the same ones shared by surrealism — the ability to convey, even in silence and stillness, the transcendent experience of dreams. As involved as Dali became with film in the early part of the 20th century, he was never as involved as he wanted to be. An article in the Guardian makes clear that Dali's notions of cinema you can see "with your eyes closed" led him to some daring and often disturbing ideas that led, often as not, to his most ambitious projects never to make the big screen. The Guardian's piece is inspired by "Dali and Film", an upcoming exhibit at the Tate Modern thoroughly and inventively documenting Dali's history of cinematic experimentation; the Times of London, who's partnering with the Tate for the exhibit, also has a lengthy feature on Dali and Buñuel's collaborations as well as video clips and other material.
And here’s a bonus: Dali’s awesome appearance on the game show “What’s My Line?” in the 1950s. One of the most surreal things he did in his career.
— Leonard Pierce
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Chicago Film Critic Roundup
5/22/2007 12:15:00 PM
Chicago, forever the flyover between L.A. and New York, likewise tends to get short shrift in the movie press. With the obvious exceptions of Roger Ebert and, to a lesser extent, Jonathan Rosenbaum, we don't talk much around here about what the critics in my hometown have to say. And, to be honest, that's usually a good thing, but occasionally, as with this week, the City of Big Shoulders carries some solid game into the building. In the Tribune, staff critic Michael Wilmington discusses the heroic legacy of John Wayne, who's often namechecked as shorthand for witless American gung-hoism; but Wilmington notes that Wayne was only a conventional hero in his lesser movies; "In his great ones, he helps redefine the concept and image of heroism, to show how contradictory and volatile it can be."
The tabloidy competition over at the Sun-Times, on the other hand, fails to take the high road, giving us an astoundingly lengthy treatise on the cinematic history of flatulence in a piece with the highly dubious subtitle claim that "Farting on film can be traced back to Shakespeare". (I'm not familiar with Shakespeare's films, but if he was making them all the way back in 1600, he pioneered a lot more than the fart joke.)
Finally, in On Film, the film blog of the Chicago Reader, Jonathan Rosenbaum combines the high and the low; reporting on the International Short Film Festival in Oberhausen, he discusses the often-frank adolescent sex comedy Schnäbi and the reaction it received from the audience, both teen and adult, which he sees as radically different than it would have gotten in the U.S.
— Leonard Pierce
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Recent Books on Orson Welles, Part 1: Discovering Orson Welles, by Jonathan Rosenbaum
5/22/2007 11:30:00 AM
Twenty-two years after his death, a "new" Orson Welles is finally beginning to emerge. Slowly, this image is supplanting the calcified older one, which has been in place since at least the mid-1940s. This old image, which posits a reckless abuser of Hollywood courtesy, a frivolous spender with a "fear of completion," later evolved into that of a roly-poly TV raconteur and wine pitchman, the ruined hulk of a once promising filmmaker who was destroyed by Hollywood. This image is also maddeningly tenacious. The new Welles who is emerging from a parade of new books on the director is a much more compatible with current critical and political thinking. This "new" Welles is a progressive independent filmmaker, a leftist and activist in race relations who perhaps by political necessity relocated to Europe, where his attitude to directing was finally free of deadline-driven commercial cinema. There, he could be a man who brewed his films at his own pace.
A key text in this slowly evolving new picture is "The Battle Over Orson Welles," Jonathan Rosenbaum's review of four then-new biographies of Welles, which was published in Cineaste in 1996. That essay has now been reprinted in Discovering Orson Welles (University of California Press, 336 pages, $24.95, ISBN 978 0 520 25123 6), happily enough for those who require easy access to it.
This essay accomplished quite a bit in a short amount of space. It introduced to many readers the notion of Welles as an independent filmmaker, a man merely using the resources of the Hollywood machine as long as they would let him for his own ends. This could replace the idea of Welles as a talented but still initially compliant member of movie industry machinery. Welles's philosophical and aesthetic distance from Hollywood is key to understanding his later years in a wholly different light, as a maverick hewing to his own schedule. And Rosenbaum's essay first introduced to some readers the cracks in the plinth hoisting David Thomson to the skies, fissures later magnified by Adrian Martin and numerous other critics. It was here in this essay that one first realized that Thomson was, or had mutated into, a censorious Hollywood apologist who identified now with the movie industry's producers and studio execs rather than film artisans he championed in earlier books.
The book gathers 26 essays spanning 1972 to 2005, a mix of dispatches, book reviews, public letters, liner notes, forewords, and afterwards, with attendant intros and suffixes that explain, describe, offer codicils, revisions, and corrections of misfacts concerning the life and career of Welles. What Rosenbaum suggested in "The Battle Over Orson Welles," was codified a few years later in "Orson Welles as Ideological Challenge," a chapter from his 2000 book Movie Wars. Here, Rosenbaum develops further the idea that Welles was in direct conflict with prevailing notions of art and commerce.
 | | Chimes at Midnight |
Rosenbaum's book is almost as complex as Welles's career. Most of the essays demand these demurrals or clarifications or contextualizations from Rosenbaum, some of them engagingly autobiographical (for example, how he met Welles once), and many are for Welles specialists only, that is, for readers who like to dig into the intricacies and conflicting testimony of Welles's career the way others like to look for Badge Men in grassy knolls.
The University of California has done a fine service by gathering together Rosenbaum's essays in one convenient location (with the addition of an enormously helpful appendix in which Rosenbaum methodically goes through Welles's oeuvre and delivers a status report), but eventually the question arises, why this book and not a massive biography of Welles, one that sets the record straight and shows some actual sympathy for the man and artist, unlike most of previous bios? Rosenbaum explains in passing why such a project would not be congenial to him, only part of which is the fact that, despite all the attention he has lavished on Welles over the years, Welles isn't even his favorite director.
The fellow critic whom Rosenbaum resembles the most, or at least mirrors in one facet, is Tim Lucas of Video Watchdog. Both are concerned first with getting the facts right, and only then building critical observations. But as journalists, their revisions and updates threaten to lose not just the general reader but the specialist as well. Presumably, Lucas's forthcoming book on Mario Bava will be the definitive book on the director, by in part synthesizing all the qualifications and updates posted in VW over the years. Rosenbaum has yet to address Welles in a single volume directed at the filmmaker's work, as opposed to his career, though who knows, perhaps this anthology is a prelude to such a book. As a collection of chronologically arranged journalism, though, with its revisions and updates, Discovering Orson Welles, as its title suggests, is more about Jonathan Rosenbaum than Orson Welles, valuable to have but secondary, or even tertiary, rather than primary material.
— DK Holm
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A Beautiful Friendship, Sort Of: Tarantino and Weinstein
5/22/2007 10:45:00 AM
I enjoyed reading this absorbing, though oddly typo-ridden, piece by Leslie Felperin from Britain’s The Independent this past weekend, about the curiously long-lasting relationship between Quentin Tarantino and the Weinstein Brothers. While many others have noted that Harvey Weinstein has been notoriously solicitous of Tarantino over the years (which QT has rewarded by continuing to make films for the Weinsteins, unlike many other name directors), Felperin notes that the relationship has not been without its arguments: Harvey originally even wanted cuts that toned down the violence in Reservoir Dogs, which Tarantino rejected. Weinstein also thought Jackie Brown, clocking in at 154 minutes, was too long. Tarantino refused to cut it, and Weinstein relented after he secured “a promise from Tarantino not to complain if, at the length he wanted, it made less than $70m.”
Let me say that again: Harvey Weinstein relented. The question that Felperin doesn’t get to, but which must be asked: Why? Why has Weinstein, infamous for chewing the heads off filmmakers who stand up to him (even if they’re named Martin Scorsese), given in to Tarantino, over and over again? Is it that QT has better powers of persuasion than everybody else? Okay, I can see how the political capital generated by Pulp Fiction might have bought him some breathing room with Jackie Brown. But Reservoir Dogs, really? And even now, Harvey has taken most of the blame for the failure of Grindhouse, even though the film’s length has been cited as the main reason for why most viewers stayed away. (QT and Rodriguez’s episodes were originally going to be around an hour long each.)
I’m not troubled by any of this: I think it’s great that Tarantino (whose films I've loved more often than not) is able to get whatever he wants out of Weinstein. I’m just curious why these two have mind-melded to such a degree. Felperin offers some intriguing clues, but I think the real story of these two has yet to be written.
— Bilge Ebiri
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Morning Deal Report: Where’s Samira, Hopkins Does Count Leo, Chavez Buys Glover
5/22/2007 10:00:00 AM
- Samira Makhmalbaf’s latest film, shooting in Afghanistan, was unable to be completed in time for Cannes. Why? Because it got hit with a grenade attack. And no, it wasn’t thrown by a critic.
- Anthony Hopkins is going to play Tolstoy, and Meryl Streep is going to play his wife, in a biopic entitled The Last Station, “a story so tortured it could have come from the pages of War and Peace.” (Hat tip: Movie City News.)
- Hugo Chavez is giving Danny Glover $18 million to make a historical epic about the 18th century slave uprising in Haiti led by Toussaint Louverture.
- Isn’t it amazing that Shrek the Third is being billed as the movie that broke “records” and not the movie that couldn’t match the opening weekend box office of the significantly longer Spider-Man 3?
- Hollywood is rethinking the idea of the glitzy, glossy premiere.
— Bilge Ebiri
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