AFI Fest 2006! Moriarty’s First Three Days! BOBBY, Ken Watanabe, Orson Welles, THE HOST... and BORAT?!

Oh, so this is how it’s going to be. It’s the wee hours of Saturday/Sunday as I start writing this piece, and I’ve got a long day ahead tomorrow. I’m exhausted right now, though, and the only way I’m going to make it through this festival publishing in any sort of timely manner is just to come home and knock these thoughts out for you, no matter what. Wednesday was the actual kick-off to the festival, even though I’d been attending press screenings ahead of time. There was only one event on Wednesday, the gala screening of Emilio Estevez’s BOBBY. When my wife and I showed up at Hollywood and Highland, we were confronted by the single longest will-call line I’ve ever encountered. However the front of the Chinese was set up, it wasn’t working. We were in line for at least a half-hour, and then we waiting inside the theater for another forty-five minutes or so, with the film starting about an hour late. Part of that was the extreme bottleneck of photographers and screaming fans as the various stars appeared on the red carpet. Part of it was because Emilio had to give speeches in both the main theater and the auditorium upstairs that they used for the spill-over crowd. My impression of Emilio based on his opening comments is that he seems to be a lot like the movie he’s made: sincere, sweet, and just a little too obvious. I’ll be the first to admit that I walked into this one skeptical. I’m no fan of Emilio’s work as a director. The mere mention of WISDOM or MEN AT WORK still set off a post-traumatic reaction in me. RATED X struck me as a fascinating story turned deadly dull. Of all of his films so far, THE WAR AT HOME was probably the only one that even came close to working, but it’s got some of the exact same problems that BOBBY does. Emilio obviously aches to make a film of real significance, and I can understand the gravitational pull exerted by RFK as a subject. Hell, at this point, Martin Sheen has played a Kennedy so many times that his family have probably become honorary Kennedys. But even though the film is jammed with archival footage of RFK, BOBBY isn’t really about him. If anything, the movie aspires to be an updated GRAND HOTEL, an ambition made explicit by Anthony Hopkins’s name-check of that classic. It features a huge ensemble cast, everyone popping up as some spoke of the interconnected web of coincidence that makes up the screenplay. For example... Heather Graham is the switchboard operator at the Ambassador Hotel, and she’s having an affair with William H. Macy, the hotel manager, who is married to Sharon Stone, the hairstylist in the hotel’s salon, who works on both Lindsay Lohan, playing a young girl marrying Elijah Wood in order to save him from Vietnam, and Demi Moore, the washed-up alcoholic lounge singer performing at the hotel, who argues about her drinking with her pussy-whipped husband, played by Emilio himself. And that doesn’t even mention Shia Le Bouf or Ashton Kutcher or Harry Belafonte or Lawrence Fishburne or Freddy Rodriguez or Christian Slater or Josh Jackson or Nick Cannon or Martin Sheen or Helen Hunt, who are all given storylines of their own that have to be serviced during the film’s running time. Whew! It must have been exhausting juggling all those clichés, but Emilio does it, and he does it sincerely. It’s hard to beat up on a movie as well-meaning and heartfelt as this one. When Emilio spoke before the film, he talked about the death of RFK as “the death of decency, the death of manners, the death of poetry” in America. He’s certainly not the first person to see the triple-blow of JFK, MLK, and RFK’s assassinations as the end of an era, a turning point in American politics. I’m not sure I agree that it’s the “death” of anything other than three charismatic and significant public figures, though, and the film certainly doesn’t make its case. There are moments that work, but just fleeting moments. Ultimately, no one connects as a real character here, instead just playing as types. Freddy Rodriguez does the best work in the film, and Shia Le Bouf is admirably funny. The last ten or fifteen minutes, when the inevitable finally occurs, plays out over an actual recording of one of RFK’s most powerful speeches, and guess what? It’s fairly powerful, but Emilio doesn’t earn it. Still, this is one of those films that is just crappy enough to win Best Picture if the acting branch of the Academy holds true to their godawful fucking taste of recent years. The Roosevelt, directly across from the Chinese, was the location of the crowded but classy after-party, and I ended up chatting briefly with Harvey Weinstein, Shia Le Bouf, and Freddy Rodriguez while enjoying the spread. It made for a late night, but most people appeared to enjoy themselves, so I guess it was a successful opening night for the fest overall. Thursday afternoon, I had something to do before I could head over to the Arclight, where most of the fest’s programming takes place. My co-writer Scott and I met at a recording studio in the middle of Hollywood, where we recorded our DVD commentary for this year’s episode of MASTERS OF HORROR. It won’t actually air until Thanksgiving (because there’s nothing America likes better with turkey than abortion and monsters), but the discs are already being put together now. We shot on-camera interviews first, and just as we were finishing, John Carpenter showed up. The three of us sat together and recorded the commentary at the same time, and I think the result was a lot of fun. Afterwards, I had to bail out and head over to the theater so I could see my first regular film of the fest. Ken Watanabe, best known to American audiences for his role in THE LAST SAMURAI, is the star and executive producer of MEMORIES OF TOMORROW, based on a novel by Hiroshi Ogiwara. Yukihiko Tsutsumi directed the adaptation, and he brings just the right touch to the material. In other hands, this easily could have been unbearable schmaltz, but the film walks a careful line in terms of tone. As a result, this was one of the most devastating emotional experiences I’ve had in a theater in a while. There are very few things I am afraid of. I don’t like heights. I’m not crazy about big dogs. But as far as real existential keep-me-up-at-night fears, there are very few. Something happening to my wife or my son would be first and foremost. Blindness is a big one for me, since that would render filmmaking pretty much impossible. And then there’s Alzheimer’s Syndrome. The notion of losing your mind, of losing yourself... it’s unbearable. If there was any justice, this film would already have a US distributor and Watanabe would be seriously in the race for Best Actor this year. It’ll never happen, of course, but it’s a damn shame. Although they have very different artistic goals, this movie put me in mind of Kurosawa’s IKIRU. Watanabe plays Saeki Masayuki, an account executive for an advertising firm. It’s obvious Saeki is very good at his job and well-respected, but they don’t go overboard the way Hollywood does. The details of his life are specific, well-observed. He’s a demanding boss but he’s even harder on himself. He’s a distant husband and father at times, but out of habit and a desire to do well by his family, not because of any fundamental hardness of heart. In short, he’s successful, sharp, and solid. The film doesn’t waste any time in showing something has started to go wrong with Saeki. He’s having vision trouble, especially while driving. He’s having some minor memory problems. He misses a meeting for the first time in his career. Saeki’s wife Emiko (played with remarkable nuance and restraint by Kenji Sakaguchi) practically has to drag him to see a doctor, and his reluctance seems justified when he gets the verdict: Alzheimer’s. The film unfolds across four years or so, and what impressed me was the way the film deals with the emotional devastation of the disease up front. It’s a tearjerker, but it hits a crescendo in the middle of the film that it wisely never tries for again. It’s like it gets over it, goes deeper. Sure, if you find out you’ve got something like Alzheimer’s, there are going to be some bitter tears spilled. But what then? What do you do when you’re cried out and you have to get on with the business of living? How do you pass your time as you wait to degenerate? That’s the question the film asks and answers so admirably. The film’s conclusion certainly is powerful, but again… don’t expect the sort of obvious sucker punch of THE NOTEBOOK. Instead, with a single shot, Tsatsumi masterfully brings the entire film together and manages to find hope and beauty in the bleakest of situations. So far, no distributor has stepped up to release this in the U.S. That’s a huge mistake, and this is a great movie. I had to run out of the Arclight as soon as the film was done, getting home just in time to play with my son and tuck him in for bed for the night. After a quick dinner with the lovely Mrs. Moriarty, I was back in the car and heading south again, this time all the way out to The Bridge, which is pretty much the opposite side of Los Angeles from the Arclight. G4 and ATTACK OF THE SHOW had set up a special 11:30 show of BORAT, and they wanted me to appear on the post-screening wrap-up they were doing. Gave me a great excuse to see the movie, too. By now, a whole lot of ink has been spilled by conventional media and the online press alike about this film and its significance. Even after the avalanche of hyperbole and the annoying, shticky in-character TV appearances Cohen’s been making, I thought this was a pretty great ride overall. It comes dangerously close to being overhyped, but I think it’s got the goods in terms of delivering what it promises. This film’s real merits (and faults) will assert themselves once you’ve seen it dozens of times. The Great Comedies settle in. They are the films that become ritual, seen so many times that they’re internalized. Films like AIRPLANE and ANIMAL HOUSE and MONTY PYTHON & THE HOLY GRAIL were like that for me as a kid. Movies like BLAZING SADDLES and CADDYSHACK and DUCK SOUP and LOVE AND DEATH, movies that enter the pantheon because they endure. They reward that kind of attention. Films like THE BIG LEBOWSKI or RAISING ARIZONA or KINGPIN or SOUTH PARK. I’m sure you can name two dozen I haven’t said here, and I’m sure I could, too. The point is, you know when you’re going to go back and see a film more than once. Or more than twice. I have a feeling I’ll see BORAT several more times, but I don’t think it particularly stands out past the best work he’s already done on the various incarnations of DA ALI G SHOW. I think Cohen’s got a classic or two in him, though. The moments when this film works, when the character absolutely connects, are genuine comedy magic. Cohen’s going to be working for a long time, I’m sure, and we’ll see different phases of his career. If he’s smart, it won’t all be a one-man show. With the right filmmaker, working with truly great actors around him, I think he could be unstoppable. I barely slept after driving home from the taping, where I was bounced off of Chris “Film Threat” Gore and Kevin and Olivia, the hosts of ATTACK OF THE SHOW, and where I talked to some more of the FILM THREAT guys and Sean “Zentertainment” Jordan and some more familiar faces. I woke up, spent some time hanging out with my boy. He’s used to having me around the house all the time, so me being in and out all week has got him super-anxious. Right around the time he crashed for a nap, I hoofed it down to the Arclight for SEARCHING FOR ORSON, making it into the theater right on time. I love the front row at the Arclight. It makes it like it’s a private screening room with a really kick-ass screen. I’m able to sit front row middle pretty much every show, since no one else wants it. Consider me pleased. Jakov and Dominik Sedlar certainly chose a classically entertaining subject for their new documentary. You can’t go too wrong piecing together material featuring Orson Welles, especially if you catch him at his most personable and gregarious. He was a spectacular storyteller and entertainer on a personal level, and he cut a wide swath wherever he went. This film is about some of the incomplete projects that Welles left behind when he died, but more than that, it tells the previously untold story of Oja Kodar, the woman who was the love of Orson’s life, even after such spectacular romances as Delores Del Rio and Rita Hayworth. And as much as I enjoy the stories told by Spielberg and Bogdanovich (who also narrates) and James Earl Jones and Paul Mazursky (hilarious here) and Jonathan Rosenbaum and Henry Jaglom, it’s the material about Kodar and featuring her talking about Orson that really moved me. There’s a youthful energy to his work that never dissipated, even in the films like DON QUIXOTE that addressed mortality and the burdens of age so well. The Sedlars paint a poignant portrait of a great artist always one step ahead of himself, hustling his art into existence however he has to, happy to pimp his genius for a little freedom in return. Welles remains a hero for so many filmmakers because of his integrity and his determination and his ability to make so much out of so little at times. Sifting through all sorts of odds and ends he shot for these various movies that never quite happened, one gets a picture of a larger movie, called ORSON WELLES, perhaps, that the filmmaker was always improvising, always adding onto, and that’s the film that the Sedlars give us a peek at with their work here. If you have any affinity for the work of Welles, or if you want to try to understand exactly what he was up against as a filmmaker in his later years, then this is worth tracking down if it ever gets a video release. This was the Croatian film’s world premiere, and I’m glad I was able to catch it. Back in 2002, I wrote on the site about a possible film version of Nicholson Baker’s THE FERMATA, and I’ve since actually read the script that Neil Gaiman wrote. It’s a tasteful but still quite strong adaptation that deals with all the moral implications of Baker’s original novel about a man who can stop time. There are some unmistakable echoes of Baker’s book in the feature film debut of writer/director Sean Ellis, based on his Academy-Award-nominated short film of the same name, CASHBACK. The film played both Cannes and Toronto this year, and it hasn’t really had much buzz that I’ve heard one way or another so far. Walking into it, I had the short film fresh in my head, since I was sent a review copy of a disc featuring many of last year’s Academy Award nominated short films. Ellis actually reuses whole chunks of the short film in the feature film version, but you’d never know it. The blend is seamless. The film itself is a low-key charmer, a hyperslick CLERKS from the UK about a young man named Ben Willis (which sounds absolutely nothing like Sean Ellis) who is an art student recovering from a terrible break-up. The first major break-up of his life, actually, and he’s not sure he’s going to recover. Ellis gets the self-indulgence of a break-up just right, and the awful physical toll it takes on Ben manifests most specifically as insomnia. Needing something that he can use to fill his sleepless nights and also broke, Ben takes a job at a local grocer’s, claiming his spot on the eccentric late-night crew. The way he deals with the eight hours of tedium every night is imagining that he has the ability to stop time. Or maybe he’s not imagining at all. Ben uses his time to undress all the women in the store, sketching their nudity at a casual pace, drinking in all the beauty he sees each night. Ellis has a strong visual style, and working with cinematographer Angus Hudson, he’s crafted a gorgeous low-budget film that doesn’t look remotely low-budget. I’m personally sick of filmmakers who figure that the more hand-held and shitty their film looks, the more “indie” it is. Give me some visual splendor in my movies, please. Not every time, but occasionally. I’m a firm believer that it’s not just the story you’re telling, but how you tell it that matters. Ellis is ultimately just putting his spin on sensitive boy finds perfect girl, and the result is at least as engaging as GARDEN STATE. Friday night was the main event, though, the film I was waiting all day to see, and even though I was pretty much exhausted by the time the 10:00 show got started, I was thrilled to finally be seeing something I’ve been personally hyped about since at least the start of the year. And it’s rare after anticipating something for so long to feel completely satisfied upon first viewing. THE HOST is one of my very favorite films of the year so far, and a canny, colossal piece of mainstream entertainment. I despise the idea of remaking this already. This film should be seen in the theater, no matter what. It should be seen with the biggest crowd possible. This is one of the great monster movies I’ve ever seen, maybe the best since JAWS. Driven by a hilarious, warm, empathic portrayal of a Korean family in crisis, this film works no matter what you want from it. Jooh-ho Bong made the slyly subversive MEMORIES OF MURDER, a film that is so much richer and smarter than the description “the Korean SE7EN” would suggest, and with THE HOST, he has once again made a movie that twists its genre in unexpected fashion. With most monster movies, we know the rhythm that we can expect from the film. An opening scene where something’s suggested, not seen. We see what it can do, but we don’t really see it. Then another attack where we get a scary glimpse of what it is. A few more teases before the eventual big reveal. It’s the way these films work. Which is one of the reasons THE HOST is such a knockout. There’s a scene about ten minutes into the film in which the monster is introduced in broad daylight, and we end up seeing it close-up and in action for the next ten minutes. It’s a demolition of what we’re supposed to expect, and it’s breathtaking work. The Orphanage and Weta both contributed to the FX work in the film, and although it may not be as seamlessly composited as the very best of big-budget Hollywood, the work here has real character and soul, and the result is a monster you believe in. This thing occupies space in the film, and it comes across as a living animal, not just a smudge of ones and zeros in a computer somewhere. This isn’t a particularly sympathetic creature, either. It’s animal, unthinking, unemotional. It wants to eat. It wants to survive. It makes confounding choices at times, but everything it does keeps it alive, and by the time the film builds to its big finish, you may not sympathize with the creature, but you will absolutely believe in it. There’s a political subtext to this film that’s not terribly veiled, but it’s kept light, just one more spice in this particular stew of influences. There’s a great ‘80s American cinema vibe to the film, like he’s been mainlining anything Amblin’ ever released. His dysfunctional family manages to survive some encounters in this film that they probably shouldn’t, if he was being totally honest as a storyteller. But that’s a minor quibble. He sets these characters up beautifully, and in the home stretch, he pays them off one-by-one to rousing effect. This is one of those films where the ending will have you physically edgy, ready to jump. It’s one of the best times I’ve had in a theater all year, and I can’t wait for January, when Magnolia plans to put this out in theaters. That wrapped up my first three days at the fest, and I’m just now finishing my next three. This is the first moment I’ve had to file a report, though, and I’ll have my next one plus this week’s DVD Shelf in the next few days. For now, I’ve got to get a little sleep before tomorrow’s full four film schedule. Drew McWeeny, Los Angeles