When I watchedThe English Patient, I recall entering a languid dreamy state ... bored stiff by repressed people and their repression. I can tell you the five minutes it had me riveted for, though -- Willem Dafoe, unwrapping his bandages, explaining that he had found the man who took his thumbs and killed him ... and now he was going to kill the man who told the man who took his thumbs where to find him. I swear to god, during that scene I wanted to cry out: "Uh, could I watch that movie right now? The one with Dafoe and Prochnow running around post-war Africa trying to kill each other? Because I'm not digging the poetry readings and mopiness. ..."
Well, I'm never going to get that movie, but this week's best new trailer made me feel like I was going to get something close to it. I've been looking forward to The Good Germanfor a while now, and now I cannot wait -- this baby looks good, to a degree that almost seems to guarantee some level of heartbreak. I'm hoping that isn't the case, and while I think the trailer's cribbing from The Third Man almost as much as the poster evokes Casablanca, I also think there are far worse movies to follow in the giant footsteps of.
By my count there are only ten or eleven weeks left till the end of the year, and the Oscar contenders just aren't measuring up. Martin Scorsese's The Departed is probably one of the best movies I've seen this year, but it's not a biopic and it doesn't have anyone sick or deformed in it. It doesn't make reference to 9/11 and it's not based on an important novel, so odds are the Academy will ignore it. Its lengthy running time and high quality may earn it a slot, but only if enough of the other contenders take a dive.
Long movies are not the problem this year. Little Children, Babel, Flags of Our Fathers and Marie Antoinette all run more than two hours, and more long movies are surely on the way. And we've got our share of Socially Important movies as well, with United 93 and World Trade Center battling it out for honors. It's a tough call: critics tended to prefer the former, but the latter has grossed twice as much. Philip Noyce also weighs in with this fall's apartheid movie, Catch a Fire. Babel and Fast Food Nation also have a lot to say about society's ills. (It doesn't even matter whether they're good movies.)
After a week away, you look around the movie world and ask yourself what, exactly is news? Casting? Gossip? Deals? Or something less immediate? I mean, Wesley Snipes is getting indicted for tax fraud -- but when was the last time Snipes had a project that didn't go straight-to-video? Or, for another example, David Fincher's Zodiac will be the first film ever - or, more appropriately, the first movie ever --to incorporate an all-digital workflow -- shot and edited without a speck of tape. That's interesting, and a sea change in the industry -- but it's not exactly sexy. Or the fact that Terrence Howard is joining Robert Downey Jr. in Iron Man -- which strikes me as weird, nearly suicidal casting in both cases. (Back when Nick Cassavetes was slated to direct Iron Man, I joked that what with the character's history of alcoholism, what I really wanted to see was John Cassavetes' Iron Man --ideally starring Ben Gazarra, and focusing just on character stuff. Is that what Favreau's going for?)
And while I was away, it feels like someone dropped a flag and started Oscar season -- this week alone Flags of our Fathers and Little Children open in the Bay Area; Infamous and The Queen have already done so; there's a screening of Fur tomorrow. Add in a few minor things to keep life interesting -- like being in a 6.7 quake on Sunday morning and making it to the last seat on the last flight out of Kona afterwards -- and I'm a little discombobulated. So what was your biggest news in the last week? And are you looking forward to any end-of-year Oscar contenders?
It's getting closer to Halloween, and that means scary movies. Of course, I love scary movies and I watch them all year long, but I watch them with a purpose in October. Most critics don't bother with scary movies, or pre-judge them, and that has led to the recent rash of horror films being withheld from the press. It goes without saying, also, that the studios know they're making bad movies by playing it safe with their remakes and sequels, rather than rolling the dice on a new idea. Most of the current horror movies have this in common: they're remakes or sequels, they were withheld from the press, and they flopped.
Hmm. I wonder if this is a pattern that ought to be avoided in the future?
Despite being directed by Neil LaBute -- a filmmaker whose entire reputation was established by critics who singled out his great debut In the Company of Men (1997) -- The Wicker Man remake (233 screens) was withheld from those same critics, and it has officially flopped, returning only $23 million on a $40 million budget.
Perhaps it seems a bit premature to speculate about the cinematic future of The Looking Glass Wars. After all, the book was only released two weeks ago in the United States, in spite of being a huge hit over in the UK for nearly two years. But the book's author, Frank Beddor, is a film producer (There's Something About Mary), and the book is so clearly written with a film version in mind that it's impossible, while reading it, not to imagine it on the screen.
After all, how many books do you know that have a trailer? And a card game? And asuccessful comic spin-off? And a soundtrack? And given the enormous success of Harry Potter,and that books like The Golden Compass, Eragon, Inkheart and TheSpiderwick Chronicles are being made into films, it doesn't seem much of a reach to think that it's only a matter of time before someone snatches up The Looking Glass Wars.
The book is another in the trend of re-imaginings of classic tales ala Gregory Maguire (Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West). Where Wicked (in the book version, at least) turned The Wizard of Oz stories on their ear, though, giving us full-fledged, conflicting political and philosophical systems, characters with hidden motivations and complex alliances, and a plot with some unpredictable twists and turns, The Looking Glass Wars is more of a one-dimensional tale. The premise is that Beddor, after years of painstaking research, has uncovered the truth about Alice Liddell, to whom Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass were dedicated. Alice, the book posits, was really Alyss Heart, princess of Wonderland. Her mother, Queen Genevieve, was violently overthrown by Redd, her psychotic older sister, in a bloody coup staged on the princess' seventh birthday.
Now that Meryl Streep's three big movies have dropped to the 400 screens-or-less mark -- The Devil Wears Prada (228 screens), The Ant Bully (78 screens) and A Prairie Home Companion (44 screens) -- I'd like to take a moment to celebrate her remarkable career. Sure, you're saying... hasn't she been celebrated enough? Not really. Few have noticed how Hollywood has chewed up and swallowed Streep, and yet she has come out the other side better than ever.
Born in New Jersey in 1949, Streep originally dreamed of the opera. She attended Vassar and Yale, performed regularly on stage and barely had to struggle before landing her first plumb movie role in Julia (1977). The following year she received an Oscar nomination for The Deer Hunter and a year later, won for Kramer vs. Kramer. She has received a total of 13 nominations, which ties her with Katharine Hepburn (one more, which could come this year, and she'll be the record holder).
I'm sure many cineastes had the same reaction to this week's box office list: cinema is now officially dead. The day Jackass: Number Two -- isn't it clever how the title is a reference to fecal matter? -- becomes the most popular film in America is the day each of us ought to give up and become plumbers. I'm talking all film critics, as well as Martin Scorsese, Quentin Tarantino, David Cronenberg, Steven Spielberg, Hou Hsiao-hsien, Wong Kar-wai, Robert De Niro, Meryl Streep, Charlie Kaufman, etc. Throw in the towel, guys. It's over. It doesn't matter anymore. I'll meet you at the bar, and I'm buying the first round.
It gets worse: At the same time, the esteemed film critic/screenwriter/film director Paul Schrader (Taxi Driver, etc.) has published a brand-new film canon in the most recent issue of Film Comment, and the news is not good. Schrader started out writing a book, but realized that film will no longer have a place in the 21st century and gave up after 20 or so pages. He does list his 60 great films for inclusion in the canon but (with the exception of Wong's In the Mood for Love) they're all products of the 20th century.
Yes, film art is gone. All you have to do is perform stupid stunts, point a video camera in that general direction, and you've got a classic.
That would be my friend Mike, checking in from Toronto, probably after seeing The Black Dahlia. That puts Mike firmly in two separate camps: People who think Josh Hartnett isn't a very good actor (or even an interesting screen presence) and the smaller group of people who actually paid money to see The Black Dahlia.
Maybe that's how they marketed Jackass: Number Two: "You'll see morons do idiotic things, but, we promise, no Josh Hartnett!"Something has to explain why Jackass can be number one at the box office, doesn't it? Actually, this is kind of what I hate about box office reporting -- there's rarely any discussion in the mainstream media about how many prints of a film were out there: When you realize that there were over 3,000 prints of Jackass: Number Two on the streets, the question is how could it not be at the top of the box office? I always find per-screen average as interesting -- or more interesting -- as which film pulled in the most money. For example, Jackass: Number Two made about $9,187 for every movie screen it played on; The Science of Sleep made $24,785. That's not a story, though -- it involves math, it involves talking about the real economics of movies and it involves looking at the business of show business. So it's a lot easier to just look at who made the most money -- doesn't matter how -- and trumpet that film as a success.
Being in back in San Francisco from Toronto is mind-blowing, really. You go from three, four, five movies a day to ... well, one or two. You can get a proper burrito. You cannot get a Tim Horton's donut. And you have to re-negotiate your relationship with your cat. But you find yourself living in San Francisco thinking about it through the movies you saw in Toronto -- how the sounds of sirens in the Panhandle makes you flash back to Monkey Warfare, which may be the best thing you saw at TIFF. Or the headlines make you think of Catch a Fire's portrait of how bad police work in a war on terror creates more terror. Or you wake up fumbling from a dream you were having -- but was it your dream, or the visions in Brand Upon the Brain or Pan's Labyrinth, which are both stuck in your head like an unforgettable tune? Even the movies you see when you're back get filtered through the lens of Toronto -- how All the King's Men makes you flash back on one interesting moment in the over-hyped, unjustly awarded mess that is Death of a President. If you're reading this, then your life is probably like that, too -- the world of movies becoming a way you see the world. It's time to go see another movie -- School for Scoundrels, and you could use a laugh -- but you can pause from writing a new daily short column about movies and news (and thinking too much about podcasting problems and reviews to write) to talk with your local café owner, who loved The Proposition, and still walk there on time to get a little sunshine before the latest round of the story-teller's darkness. And what film are you seeing the world through, lately?
Incidentally, of the top 351, 70 films have broken $200 million, 22 films have broken $300 million, 7 films have broken $400 million (Dead Man's Chest is one of them), and only one -- Titanic -- has reached $600 million.
I had two highly anticipated screenings tonight. The first was Fido, better known around TIFF as "you know, that Canadian zombie flick that's kinda like Shaun of the Dead." The film, which stars Carrie-Anne Moss and Billy Connolly, is a fable about a tiny town permastuck in the 1950s. Space dust fell onto earth years back, causing all the dead to rise, becoming hungry, flesh-eating zombies, until Zomcom came along and invented a zombie collar that makes the zombies placid and obedient. The zombies have become a slave-worker class, doing all the crap work no one else wants to do. Full review to come on this one, but it was sure a crowd pleaser at its premiere. The audience was laughing so hard around me I almost missed some lines a few times, and at the end there was much whooping and hollering.
The hottest ticket in town tonight, though, was for the midnight screening of Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan. This show was one of the first to sell out at the fest, a people were offering to pay up to $400 a ticket. The pic above shows the line behind me -- and I got there late due to the Fido screening.
It was quite a culture shock going from the peace and beauty of Telluride to the hustle and energy of the Toronto International Film Festival. My trip to Toronto involved numerous mishaps which seem a little more amusing after a solid night's sleep than they did at the time. First, flying out of Gunnison, I almost didn't get on my plane at all because I didn't have a passport, just my birth certificate (which is all you're required to have until December 31). The kid at the counter was flustered by my lack of a passport, however, and it took a very long time and him making several phone calls to finally figure out that no, I did not have to have a passport, and yes, there was a way to enter me in the system and print my boarding passes.
The flight to Denver was on a tiny prop plane (did I mention I hate small planes and that I'm claustrophobic?) and we had major turbulence for all 36 minutes and 23 seconds we were in the air, not that I was counting. Also, in spite of the fact that on the flight to Gunnison we had been provided bottled water, on the flight out, when someone asked about the water, the flight attendant rudely snapped that we weren't getting any and it was a short flight anyhow. You'd be amazed how thirsty and grumpy 40 people can get when they are deprived of water for half an hour.
A recent news story reported that while fewer 2006 movies have broken the $150 million mark (13 in 2005 and only 7 in 2006) the overall box office has been much higher. That's good news for everyone; it corresponds to a New York Times magazine story from a few months ago. With new types of tracking tools, companies are realizing that there's good money to be made from smaller items. While one super-widget may make a ton of money and look good on the record books, the combination of the sales of hundreds of smaller widgets may actually equal that sum.
For example, Apple has noticed that, while iTunes has its best-selling songs that rank in the top 100 each day, they also do good business on older songs. Virtually every song in their catalog gets downloaded at least once every few months. This is called "individual taste" and it assumes that customers are human beings.
I grew up near here, but at the time it wasn't near at all; Toronto was just stations on the TV, voices on the radio, where the Sunday paper came from. It was an hour-and-a-half drive, or a well-planned afternoon on a terrific transit system, and it was a world away. Coming to Toronto for the Film Festival is, for me, always a bit disconcerting -- I remember how awestruck I felt at age 14 seeing the inside of Toronto's retail landmark Eaton Centre for the first time. Bear in mind, the EatonCentre is a mall with one thing going for it: It is enclosed during winter. But I was easily impressed. In many ways, I still am, and grateful for it.
And Toronto never leaves my mind. How could it? I watch the trailers for movies I wouldn't watch in a thousand years and, yes, there's Milla Jovovitch running down Toronto's City Hall building, as it explodes about her. Or I perk up during a dull action film for two things: Brian Cox and the moment Chow-Yun Fat strides by a Toronto Sun box. Or the music of Broken Social Scene playing counterpoint to Ryan Gosling's imploding life in Half Nelson. These things crop up everywhere.
Or they do if you look for them, and all Canadians are cultural critics at heart -- early on you're told That culture is not you. It's not you because it's American, French-Canadian, English-Canadian; spinning the TV dial was an act of cultural roulette. And you went to the movies at a big movie palace, The Tivoli, and for a few dizzy Star Wars-Indiana-Jones-Aliens years, you would be part of a line that stretched down the block past the funeral parlor.
When I watched The English Patient, I recall entering a languid dreamy state ... bored stiff by repressed people and their repression. I can tell you the five minutes it had me riveted for, though -- Willem Dafoe, unwrapping his bandages, explaining that he had found the man who took his thumbs and killed him ... and now he was going to kill the man who told the man who took his thumbs where to find him. I swear to god, during that scene I wanted to cry out: "Uh, could I watch that movie right now? The one with Dafoe and Prochnow running around post-war Africa trying to kill each other? Because I'm not digging the poetry readings and mopiness. ..." 
Perhaps it seems a bit premature to speculate about the cinematic future of 
I got a text message some time on Saturday:
