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.
I'm getting ready to interview Todd Field -- one of those deals where the professional in you has to fight the movie-nerd: I'm gonna meet someone who worked with frickin' Kubrick! -- so I'm a little nervy about that. I also dealt with recompression last night -- after a week on Hawaii's Big Island, walking down Market to the Metreon (or, rather, Metreon) to go see Flags of Our Fathers, and the change from tree-lined lava paths to conventioneer-lined city boulevards is a little nervy as well: Where did all these people come from? And, to quote The Old 97's, how soon can they leave? So today I'm sort of mulling over the Eastwood in preparation to write it, and that's a little nervy too -- it's one of those deals where, like The Passion of the Christ or World Trade Center, judging the film is not connected to judging the events it covers, and yet it feels like there's that correlation. And speaking of Jesus, how did I miss the story about Keisha Castle-Hughes, star of The Nativty, getting pregnant? I mean, you can make your own joke here -- Talk about method acting! Or Wow, that's some immaculate promotion! -- but then you realize you're talking about, like, a human being. And that realization makes you nervy. And that you need to cut down on coffee and irony in equal measure.
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?
I'm heading out-of-town for a few days on a vacation -- first one in quite some time -- so no Letters From the Editor's desk for a little while. But I did want to share with you what happens when you mention to a movie nerd that it's raining in Kona, and he may want to pack a few movies for those damp, unhikable, un-snorklable evenings. Lighter stuff; nothing too dark or dreary or deep. With that in mind, I now have a portable DVD binder jammed with the following:
Singin' in the Rain Amelie The Venture Brothers, Season One Dazed and Confused (Criterion, both Discs) The Disorderly Orderly Brick Infernal Affairs The Philadelphia Story Saturday Night Live: The Best of TV Funhouse Heavy Metal Parking Lot Bad Santa: Director's Cut.
... Yeah, I know: Pretty dorky. And pretty silly, too; who brings movies to Hawaii? But then again, a rainy night is a rainy night -- and it's not like I'm an accountant and someone asked me to bring along some amortization tax timetables. I hope you're all well; I'll see you on the 16th.
Either there's a day-care center in my new neighborhood, or some kind of manimal-making medical experiments; either would explain the high-pitched shrieks coming through my window during the afternoons.
Personally, I hope it's the manimal factory. But you know, that's just me.
It's actually tough to write today --and not just thanks to the screams from the manimal factory. (Ok, the day care center.) The Departed is still buzzing around in my head; it's as if you took a thousand gritty cop movies and boiled them down into a crack-like nugget of gunsloyaltysecretsdeath. Add in cloudy weather and ugh, it's tough to make the words come. One time a friend asked me what my trick to beating writer's block was, and I explained that it's not really a trick: The movies open on Friday. If you want to do a kind of writing where you get to stroke your beard a lot and think deep thoughts for weeks on end before committing them to paper, this is a bad field to go into. For all of it's airy-thin uselessness, I think of writing about movies as, essentially, a blue-collar pursuit: Things come off the assembly line, and you have to do quality control on time. Bus drivers don't get bus driver's block, and I feel the same way about writing. And that's the deal this week, I guess. Are you excited about The Departed? Or Shortbus? Or Last King of Scotland? What's the next movie you can't wait to see?
"It's weird that there are two Truman Capote films." "Well, it's like what happened with Armageddon and Deep Impact." "So the movie is about Truman Capote rocketing towards earth, where he might wipe out all humanity?" (Pause.) "I'd watch that. ..."
So the new Martin Scorsese screens tomorrow here in SF, and I'm excited -- so much so that I've been referring to tomorrow as "Marty Gras." But here's the secret: I'm always hoping a movie will be good before the lights go down. I mean, why not live in hope? Why not go in thinking "Okay, show me something ... " It's not like I rub my hands together smugly going "Oooooh, I can't wait for this to suck ...", and even when I'm dreading something I'm still wishing, praying that it'll prove me wrong and be worth the time to see it, think about it, live with it. The fact I'm going to be seeing, guaranteed, Michael Bay's Transformerssometime next year is an ugly fact, but even then, I'll be stupidly optimistic that it might be the robots-turn-into-cars movie I've been waiting for my whole life despite the fact I have zero interest in robots that turn into cars.
Are you excited about The Departed? Or, for that matter, anything else coming soon?
I've been writing From the Editor's Desk for Cinematical for, wow, a whole week -- and I'm a little concerned that it might make me sound like one of Dana Carvey's Grumpy Old Man Weekend Update pieces. So let me tell you about something I love:
They're showing Them! Outside at The Presidio this weekend. The San Francisco Film Society puts on Film in the Fog every year showing films outside, and this year it's one of my favorite monster films. ("Shoot the antennae! It's blind without them!") And to be honest, as much as I love my DVD collection, as much as I love going to press screenings and what-have-you, there's nothing like watching a film with a bunch of people you don't know. And it's Them! -- what a perfect film, full of atom age paranoia and nicely-crafted cheapness. (It doesn't hurt that Them! was supposed to be in 3-D but that never happened -- so the film has plenty of lunging, goofy 3-D cinematography.) And there's gonna be kids there who've never seen it, and people older than I who remember it from their youth, and it's gonna be great. I think I'm gonna yell out loud when I see Nimoy on-screen, too.
It was a hell of a day, yesterday, movie-wise. 49Up, Little Childrenand The Guardian. And -- not-so-nicely -- about a 10-minute window to bust five blocks between the first two; anyone who thinks this job involves no physical activity is invited to do the Market Street jog with me. It feels like awards season is here - the deadline for Foreign and Documentary films for the Oscars is approaching, for heaven's sake, and it's still September -- and that, as ever, means an embarrassment of riches. And wretches, too -- coulda-shoulda-wanna be awards flicks like All The King's Men and Bobby that are as glossy and inert as the statue they lust after.
One of yesterday's comments suggested that Josh Hartnett is "one of the best actors." I don't want to make fun of anyone -- okay, maybe I do a little -- but if you're looking to have a meeting of the "Josh Hartnett is the best actor ever" club, let me know; there's still a phone booth in my neighborhood that would fit all the members comfortably.
So we're going to do another Halloween costume contest on Cinematical this year; check out last year's winner if you want to know where the bar is set. All I know is that last year, I saw Lloyd Dobler walking down Church street, boom box aloft, and was agog and aghast at the simplicity and power of a trench coat and a stereo. We'll keep you posted, I promise.
Well, it's not a web column until you get a rude comment. And no, I'm not suggesting that The Science of Sleep would have made as much money if it had played on the number of screens that Jackass: Number Two did -- I'm just saying that the usual mode of Box Office reporting is kinda boring and useless.
And speaking of boring and useless, can you believe that the Uwe Boll boxing story is getting any pick up, anywhere? I'm not going to link to it -- that's just giving the bad man what he wants -- but again, it's kinda one of those deals like when Churchill said that if Hitler invaded Hell, he would at least make a nice positive reference to the Devil on the floor of the House of Parliament. Thing is, looking at the lineup of 'critics' that Uwe fought, well, I think it's more like the miserable exploiting the miserable -- if you think you're an actual critic, that means you don't go box a fracking director.
And speaking of 'fracking,' when's Galactica back on? It's a three-movie day today -- 49 Up, Little Children and The Guardian -- so I'm soon off to the dark, and let's be honest; this time of year is when Oscar-mania starts, and bring it on. Right now, if you asked me to make a Top Ten of stuff that had been released, It would include Half Nelson, Brick, and the word 'Pass' eight times over. ...
What are the best films in release you've seen so far this year?
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.
As happens so often, David Poland says it best: "I have to say, after feeling like it was a very soft year in Toronto, looking through the book makes me hungry for another week of screenings from the festival." And that's the thing -- I'm stressing with an inner voice that looks and sounds like Don Knotts gulping how my Toronto reviews are late, late, late -- and in many cases, these are for movies that won't be opening up in the world for months. Why is it that living in the future -- in the small way that film festivals let you -- isn't seen as a gift, but as a crisis? Natural pessimist, I guess. Or just feeling old.
I got a great, dumb piece of promo this week -- not the Thank You For Smokingsmoking baby doll or the Nightmare on Elm Street 'stay awake' kit, nice as they are. I mean, I get this stuff rarely, and I can't imagine what I'd do if I got more -- there must be a dumpster out back of Entertainment Weekly like the Vatican of some t-shirt and frisbee cargo cult -- but a lot of the time, it's stupid: A cat carrier and stuffed ferret for a lame rom-com? (See, I didn't even mention it! Take that, backers of Along Came Polly ... oops.) But this week, I get ... a belt. Whose big-ass buckle is the stylized 'X' of the X-Men films, to promote the upcoming DVD release of X-Men: The Last Stand. (I guess graphic design is one thing even Brett Ratner can't screw up.) It has the mutant power to hold up my pants. I'm wearing it right freaking now. I may be old, but I was 14 once, too, you know.
Browsing CNN at 5:00 am yesterday -- it was TV morning -- I saw the story that the MPAA has decided to 'red-band' the trailer for the upcoming doc Deliver Us From Evil. The trailer -- cut by Lionsgate from Amy Berg's excellent documentary -- has, essentially, been rated 'R,' and can't play anywhere except in front of an R or NC-17 movie. Of course, as the CNN story explains many theater chains won't play 'red-band' trailers at all, meaning that the most traditional mode of publicizing a movie -- in the Coming Attractions -- isn't available to Lionsgate or Deliver Us From Evil in many cases. This decision is prompting Lionsgate to release the film unrated -- again, affecting where the film can be shown and advertised. (I wish Kirby Dick's This Film Is Not Yet Rated had done a better job of explaining that, in fact -- the mall leases and newspaper policies that strangle unrated films in their crib with red tape.) I've seen Deliver Us From Evil, and while it's about rough stuff -- a serial child abuser who was essentially protected by the Catholic Church for 20 years -- it's real stuff; this all happened, and nothing in director Amy Berg's treatment of the story is salacious or sensational or cheap. But the MPAA (whose anonymous ratings board includes representatives of clergy) is choosing to significantly impact the marketing of Deliver Us From Evil with their decision. As has been asked before: Who are these people again? And what, exactly, are they protecting us from? (Addenda: For the trailer, click here.)
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?
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. ..." 
I've been writing From the Editor's Desk for Cinematical for, wow, a whole week -- and I'm a little concerned that it might make me sound like one of 
