Hey folks, Harry here with the latest from Toronto by the stunningly beautiful Anton Sirius! As he continues to sashshay his delectable hips around that Northern territory getting the nitty and gritty on what is debuting. ALEXANDRA'S PROJECT sounds pretty dang cool. I'm a bit disappointed on the word about I LOVE YOUR WORK, I was actually pulling for that one. Here's Anton...
Fest Report, Days One & Two
I've got to dash, but here's a couple of quick bits of news:
- mark Lost in Translation down for the People's Choice Award now. The buzz is off the charts on this one. And hand Scarlet Johansson her Belle of the Ball award now too -- I didn't bother listing the Vegas odds this year because Johansson was the prohibitive fave (Chloe Sevigny was the only other lass under 10-1) and apparently rightfully so. In about five to ten years we might be calling Francis Ford Coppola Sofia's dad, not the other way around.
- speaking of Coppola, I chatted with George Hickenlooper, the director of Mayor of the Sunset Strip and co-director of Hearts of Darkness (the brilliant Apocalypse Now doc), at the Sunset Strip after-party. About a month ago he was talking with Francis about a DVD release of Hearts of Darkness -- the sticking point is the infamous Martin Sheen heart attack scene. Coppola wants a bit of narration added to the beginning of the sequence to further clarify exactly what he means when he goes on his "Martin Sheen isn't dead until I say he's dead!" rant.
Now, it's not my place to tell Francis Ford Coppola what he should do, but I think it's an unnecessary and somewhat futile step. The film, as is, gives plenty of context for the rant -- Coppola is clearly pissed at his staff for going behind his back and telling the studio about Sheen's condition before Coppola had figured out how he was going to handle the situation, not railing against God and trying to shout back the specter of Death or something. And further narration won't dispel the urban legend that's grown up around that interpretation, just as Sting telling people 10 years later that he was pulling Bob Geldof's leg with that tantric nonsense is going to change the way the general public sees him. That moment has become part of the mythology of Francis Ford Coppola, for better or worse, and delaying the release of Hearts of Darkness won't rewrite it.
- I've got one more interview, with those merry pranksters the Yes Men. Anyone who takes on the World Bank and, well, not wins maybe but at least avoids prison and a lifetime of audits, counts as a hero in my book. The Toni Collette interview might be off though due to scheduling conflicts
-- I'll keep you posted.
Alexandra's Project (2003, directed by Rolf de Heer)
Hollywood has forgotten what revenge is.
Now, don't get me wrong good guys revenging themselves on bad guys, bad guys taking unjust revenge on good guys, anti-heroes and fucked-up losers taking revenge on the world... the problem is, though, that it's all cookie cutter revenge. Hollywood has forgotten that revenge isn't about blowing stuff up, it's about delicious, meticulous planning, and that it should take a form so surprising and vicious that the victim can't possibly see it coming, and will never recover from it. Hollywood has forgotten that revenge is about suffering, not death.
Alexandra's Project is a film about a man, and a woman, and their kids; and all the ways that a marriage can slowly twist and die when everyone's backs are turned; and what happens when one of them finally decides, "Enough".
This is not a date movie. This is not a sit-around-and-discuss-the-subtext-afterwards movie. This is a lock-your-doors-and-shun-contact-with-the-opposite-sex-afterwards movie. It's brutal, and uncompromising, and absolutely savage, just the way it needs to be.
Hollywood has forgotten what revenge is, but Rolf de Heer hasn't. Goddess help us all.
Mayor of the Sunset Strip (2003, directed by George Hickenlooper)
We all need to believe we can be greater than we are.
The Mayor of the Sunset Strip is a film about Rodney Bingenheimer. Who, you ask? He's an LA DJ who spends his time basking in the limelight of others, yet at the same time the shadow he himself casts over the American music scene is massive. He's not quite a groupie, and nothing like a svengali, yet somehow he ended up as the arbiter of pop success, the man who introduced Bowie and the Ramones and the Go-Gos and Oasis and countless others to the American charts. He's the guy who knows the man -- Rodney is friends with so many stars, and has appeared casually in the background of so many photos and film clips over the years, that he makes Zelig look like Thomas Pynchon.
The tale the doc tells is fascinating enough but, like the music industry itself, the film isn't above using Rodney's unique status to send its own message (like any healthy Hollywood relationship, Rodney uses the film right back.) Rodney is a mirror held up to the idea of celebrity itself. He's the ultimate social misfit who can only glow when standing next to a bonfire, whose pure love of music is possibly only exceeded by his need to feel that he has a place among giants, an exile from an unhappy childhood who makes a surrogate family for himself one backstage party at a time...
...except of course in the end that isn't the whole story either. Just as those photos on the wall can't possibly reveal the whole picture about his relationship with Elvis or Cher or Courtney Love, the movie makes clear that behind it all is a human being just like any other -- not an empty mirror catching fleeting fragments of reality but a person who, just like you and me, needs love and acceptance and a horizon just out of reach.
Like all the best pop songs, Rodney's story is sad and sweet, something that seems inconsequential and yet leaves you changed forever after you hear it. His turn in the spotlight has finally arrived, and now it's our turn to be the guy who knows the man. He brought us this far -- I hope we prove as worthy of the role as Rodney has been.
I Love Your Work (2003, directed by Adam Goldberg)
The directorial debut from one of Hollywood's fringy weirdos (I'll always have a soft spot in my heart for Goldberg after his performance as the not-quite-dead guy in the Prophecy), I Love Your Work is just about everything you'd want and expect from a first feature by an actor -- it's indulgent, needlessly complicated, wears its influences on its sleeve, and has more than enough good moments to convince you that Goldberg could someday be a fantastic director.
First the bad news -- the plot. Gray (Giovanni Ribisi) is an A-list Young Hollywood type, who's toying with the idea of a nervous breakdown. His marriage to another A-lister, Mia (Franka Potente) is unraveling, he's paranoid of being stalked while at the same time stalking his own past and a concept of Normal that is as unreal as the films he stars in, and his constant self-medication can't quite drive back the demons that haunt him. This being a film about "the industry" made by a newbie still in love with possibility more than storytelling, the structure is multi-layered. Film and reality merge and collide and subvert each other. The whole thing more or less makes sense in the end, but it's a heck of a long way to go to get there.
The film carries a heavy burden in references too. The most obvious and glaring is the score, which is way too Jon Brion (PTA's resident musical collaborator) to be a coincidence. A single melody, a drunken lurching circus-like thing, is used over and over in different styles and arrangements, until in the end it's revealed (or maybe not) to be a snatch of song from the Jacques Demy-like film that attracted Gray to Mia in the first place. The usual New Wave films-about-films rear their venerable heads as well, and I Love Your Work just never rises above any of them for more than a few seconds at a time.
All that said, the movie's by no means horrible. Goldberg gets uniformly good-to-excellent performances from his cast. Of course you'd expect no less from the likes of Potente and Christina Ricci, or from Vince Vaughn's cameo, but the work of people like Ribisi, Joshua Jackson and relative acting neophytes like Shalom Harlow and Elvis Costello also deserve noting. And of course Goldberg's own cameo is pretty much perfect.
Goldberg also has a flair for humor that gets sadly misplaced towards the end of the film. There's a lot of subtle character stuff going on, for instance, that reminded me of nothing so much as Being John Malkovich in the way Vaughn and Costello are essentially playing an exaggerated version of the general public's idea of who they are. Goldberg's directing also shows a lot of promise. His problem is that he shows no restraint -- when he has a cool idea for a shot or sequence he uses it, even if the best thing for the story would have been to keep it simple. It's the kind of thing you can fault the film for, but not really the filmmaker. He's young, and he'll learn.
All in all I Love Your Work seemed like a curiosity to me -- a student film blown up by cast and budget and strained to, but not over, its breaking point, a movie you see not for its own sake but so you can look back and say, "I was watching Goldberg's films back when he was doing stuff like THIS."
Cypher (2002, directed by Vincenzo Natali)
BEWARE of SPOILERS!
I think I'm ruined on the paranoid thriller. I've read too much Philip K. Dick, seen too much Hitchcock and Frankenheimer and M. Night -- every twist seems telegraphed from a mile away because my hyper-sensitive brain has already analyzed every possible outcome. And I'm sure I'm not alone in that state.
Cypher is far from a bad film. It looks great, starting off in a Minority Report-like ghost world of grays and blacks and whites before slowly opening up to the whole spectrum of color as the plot itself warms up. It teases at being about Important Issues but never loses sight of its ultimate goal of being entertaining. Jeremy Northam turns in an amazing performance that trades off on his matinee idol looks in some surprising ways.
And yet the film lacked any suspense for me. Once its genre was established my mind was already looking for the angle, trying to anticipate what the big twist might be, trying to ready myself for every eventuality. Once a couple more pieces fell into place there was only one possible gotcha waiting at the end, and the movie simply became a very pretty, somewhat unhurried funhouse ride.
Cypher is the kind of film that might blow their minds in Boise, but jaded big-city folk are just as likely to sniff and say, "Been there, done that, bought the I Am ________ t-shirt."
Whether that's a failing of the film, or us jaded big-city folk, I can't say.
