March 27, 2007
The 13th annual Chlotrudis Awards 
(named, as I’m sure you remember,
after the two cats Chloe and Trudy)
occurred over a week ago at the Brattle Theatre, so I apologize for keeping
those who’ve been anxiously waiting for the results to find out how they did on their office pools.
(Hint: Eddie Murphy still got snubbed).
Here are the winners:
BEST MOVIE
Cache
BEST DIRECTOR
Michael Haneke - Cache
BEST ACTOR
Vincent Lindon - La Moustache
BEST ACTRESS
Robin Wright Penn - Sorry, Haters
BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR
Jackie Earle Haley -Little Children
BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS
Carmen Maura - Volver
BEST PERFORMANCE BY AN ENSEMBLE CAST
Little Miss Sunshine
BEST VISUAL DESIGN
The Science of Sleep
BEST ADAPTED SCREENPLAY
Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story
BEST ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY
The Proposition
BEST DOCUMENTARY
This Film is Not Yet Rated
BURIED TREASURE (tie)
Iron
Island
The Night of Truth
Buried treasure? These are all buried treasures. The combined box
office for all of the them put togetherwouldn’t add up to last weekend’s share for
just one Mutant Ninja Turtle (though I’m sure these trophies will turn that
around). 
In a sense, “Cache,” i.e, “Hidden,” is an appropriate way to describe
the winners and nominees as a whole.
The same holds for the winner of their Lifetime Achievement Award, Don
McKellar. Huh? That’s what happens when you’re Canadian, nobody knows who you
are. McKellar is a fine actor ("Exotica"), a sometimes brilliant screenwriter (“Thirty-two
Short Films About Glenn Gould”) and an ambitious yet unfulfilled director (“Last
Night”).
That may change with his next project. Back in 1999 I interviewed
him for “Last Night” and he said he was working on an adaptation of
“Blindness,” a book by José Saramago. Who? I asked. You know, he said, the
winner of the Nobel Prize last year. If it was an Oscar, I assured him, I would
have known. He recommended I read the book, and I did, finding it an austere,
chilling allegory about a plague of
blindness and how the victims cope. Good luck getting it made, I thought, even
with the Nobel Prize.
Years passed. The other day I noticed an article in "The Hollywood
Reporter" stating that McKellar's adaptation of "Blindness" will soon be made. Fernando Meirelles (“The Constant
Gardener”)will direct a cast that includes new 007 Daniel Craig, Julianne
Moore and, of course, McKellar.
Which just goes to show you the power of a Chlotrudis Award.
March 22, 2007
The success of “300” (which I liked) and “Ghost Rider” (which I
haven’t seen) has some industry experts — Peter Bart of “Variety” and
Patrick Goldstein of the “L.A. Times”
for example — questioning the validity of elitist film critics reviewing films
that appeal to the masses, i.e.: cutting
edge pop culture afficiandoes. Shouldn’t they be reviewed by hip, elitist
fanboys instead? Shouldn’t all films be reviewed by people who like them or who
can reflect the promotional spin of the multi-million dollar studio marketing
campaigns that sweep audiences in like sheep? Shouldn’t we just let the studios
PR departments review their own films which they practically are doing already,
film critics’ pathetic attempts to remain aloof and “critical” notwithstanding?
If so, then, I have no problem with this latest
development in movie adaptations reported in “Variety.” Oh, eggheads squawked
about the end of cinema when they started adapting comic books way back when
Tim Burton made “Batman” in 1989, and that turned out okay. Film survived
versions of video games and theme park rides and “Snakes on a Plane." Even the talk
of late to turn out movies featuring figures from TV commercials (the Burger “King”
and the Geico cave men, for example) might even rejuvenate the medium. So why
not make a movie based on a really bad but extremely popular painting?
Say what you will about Thomas Kinkade, but in terms of profit
his canvases have put Picasso (Kinkade claims to have made a billion dollars in sales of
artwork alone) to shame. It was only a matter of time before the
studios caught on to the phenomenon and figured out a way to exploit it. Thus, in
time for the holidays, Lionsgate Pictures says we can look forward to a feature
film adaptation of Kinkade’s painting “The Christmas Cottage.”
No doubt the film will cash in big, perhaps even hit the opening
weekend $70 million of “300.” How should critics respond? Clearly it must be
good if so many people think so. And if elitist critics pooh pooh the film as
kitsch and a travesty of cinema just as art critics have denouced the paintings,
who, according to Bart and Goldstein, would be best qualified to review such a
movie? Or have we reached the point where art and aesthetics and quality are
irrelevant?
March 15, 2007
So far “300” has probably made enough money to pay each of the Spartans at
Thermopylae, or their survivors, about 300
grand apiece. So I figured I should chime in with my opinion. Here’s the review
I wrote for broadcast on WFNX followed by few extra comments and observations.
"300"
When a film makes $71 million in its opening weekend, and at the
same time outrages 70 million Iranians, it pretty much demands to be
interpreted as some manifestation of the Zeitgeist. Not that you need to
stretch things much to come up with a political spin for Zack Snyder’s
adaptation of Frank Miller’s graphic novel, “300.”
Based on the ancient Battle of Thermopylae, in
which a band of “300” Spartans and their fellow Greek allies held off hundreds
of thousands of Persian Emperor Xerxes’s invaders, “300” offers some
unavoidable parallels with the present day. Leonidas, played in bearded, buff
bravura by Gerard Butler,
is king of hardass hyper-militaristic
Sparta. He’s someone
whose idea of negotiation is shoving the Persian diplomats into a bottomless
pit. So he shares certain traits with a certain
US president. Similarly, against
the wishes of the Spartan equivalent of Congress, Leonidas
goes off on a doomed military adventure to
destroy the threat of Middle Eastern fanatics. Draw what conclusions you wish.
On the other hand, the sheer, idiotic exuberance of “300” belies
such pointy headed analysis. Could any story be more simple-minded? Here the
good-guys have bulging pecs and bulging leather codpieces, and the bad guys are
all either deformed, non-white or wear heavy eye make-up. Any questions about
whom to hate and kill? Meanwhile, Snyder’s kinetic, CGI-addled compositions,
his cutting, slo-mo and blood spurts, triumphantly evoke Miller’s hyperbolic
graphic style. And those so inclined can note allusions to artists like Goya or
Dore or to motifs in ancient Greek pottery. If it’s mindless entertainment you
want, or even entertainment for the mind, I’d give “300” 3 stars.
Goya or Doré? Okay, so I go off the deep end a bit (though if
compare with the former’s “Disasters of War” or the latter’s engravings for
“Paradise Lost” you’ll see I’m not totally off base). At any rate, here’s my
additional two cents worth.
1. Why is such a hit? It’s the illiterate’s “Lord of the Rings.”
The parallels are nearly plagiaristic. A horde of twisted Orcs 
led by a
superhuman malevolent tyrant against a last ditch outfit of pretty boys (okay,
no dwarfs or hobbits) determined to save civilzation. There’s even a Gollum
character. And like LOR, it touches on anxieties about the conflict of
civilizations currently known as the “War Against Terror.”
2. Speaking of which, it seems ironic that the Iranians are
complaining about the historical accuracy of the film
and its negative
reflections on their Persian ancestors, what with their nutty leader Mahmoud
Ahmadinejad and his denial of the Holocaust. But it seems in this case they
have a point. As historians have noted in articles about the film, it was the
Spartans, not the Persians who practiced slavery. And even in the context of
the film, people surrender their children to brutal military training (provided
they aren’t murdered at birth for not meeting the Spartan eugenics standards),
and resolve disputes by disembowelling those who disagree with them. What kind
of “freedom” and “reason” is this that they’re supposedly dying for?
3. The big fan base for the film appears to be red-blooded fan
boys, lad magazine types who see in it the epitome of the testosterone soaked
heterosexual violent guy movie. Or as this blogger
puts it in a posting titled “Guy Movies for…um…Guys:” “Leave it Frank Miller a
guy who knows how to write about real men for men to bring one home for the guys.
With the help of Zack Snyder, Frank’s award winning, dark graphic novel 300 has
been brought to the screen with enough blood and guts to get any red blooded
male with a pulse hard. This movie blew me away and could only be described as ‘dick
nasty.’”
Well, I hate to be the one to break the news, but “300” is the
gayest movie since “Dreamgirls.” Did you notice that except for the dutiful,
grin-and-bear-it like farewell coupling
of Leonidas and his queen, all the “normal”
male-female nooky takes place between deformed lepers and hunchbacks and doped-up
fifteen-year-old schoolgirls? Most of the film, you’ll remember, consists of
phalanxes of oiled-down hunks in hot pants with shaved chests and ripped torsos
prancing together in choreographed ranks like a goddamn chorus line. And don’t
forget, as the historians remind us, that Leonidas’s crack about Athens and their love of
philosophy and young boys notwithstanding, it was the Spartans who perfected
the practice of pederasty between fellow soldiers to promote unit cohesion.
4. Which kind of brings me to Gen. Peter Pace’s recent remarks
about the “don’t ask, don’t tell” military policy in which says that gays are
“immoral” and detract from military effectiveness. It seemed to work okay for the
Greek (and the Persian; those Immortals were a close-knit unit) elite forces. And
check out the Macedonian army of Alexander the Great while you’re at it. If you
don’t think gays should serve in the military, go tell the Spartans.
March 13, 2007
As expected, “Red
Road” won
the Fipresci Award. It also won the Miami Festival’s Knight World Competition
Prize, which pays $25,000. The Fipresci Prize pays nothing. All we offer is
glory. Let me put it this way: that 25 grand from the Knight Prize might last a
week — a week-end at most at South
Beach prices — and all
the “Red Road”
people (the award was accepted by actor Tony Curran, who looks like he might
enjoy a good time) will have afterwards is a headache and embarassing memories.
The priceless glory of a Fipresci award lives forever.
But the Miami Festival was not all artistic glory. There were
celebrity sightings as well. For example, at the chi-chi dinner celebrating Luc
Besson I not only shared a table with a charming, cinephilic banker from Wachovia
(one of the Festival sponsors) who admitted to weeping at the Adam Sandler film
“Click,” but I also got a glimpse at Mickey Rourke, who was either a surprise
guest or crashing the party (both the Wachovia gentleman and I agreed that
Rourke was the best thing in “Sin City”).
A day or two later I was walking down Lincoln Road and I spotted
Fred Willard, winner of the Boston Society of Film Critics Best Supporting
Actor Award in 2000 for his performance in “Best in Show” and at the festival
representing the closing night film, “Ira & Abby” (no award there, I fear).
He looked confused; perhaps he had just seen the man with the six Italian
greyhounds.
On a lighter note, I also met this bird, who seemed friendly at
first but turned verbally abusive and violent. Unlike the seraphic Eclectus, perhaps
the nicest parrot I have ever met. A terrapin delighted us with this spot-on
imitation of Mickey Rourke.
To top off my trip, I met the most special
Surprise Guest of all.
March 08, 2007
The Miami Festival differs from others not only in the racy surroundings against which its film must compete but also in that the quality of the films seems to have peaked early rather than starting slow and building up steam. The last half dozen or so movies just haven't been winners. Nonetheless, they play out certain themes I've noticed. This often happens in film festivals, either because of the programmer's personal inclinations, or the universal zeitgeist, or my own mental disorders.
For example, a few of the films involve a crazy mother. I've already mentioned "Sweet Mud," in which a 12-year-old must bear the burden of a crazy mother in a sinister, repressive kibbutz that rejects her. Well, her problems are a walk in the park compared to the mother in Indian director Chitra Palekar's "A Gravekeeper's Tale." Once again a 12-year-old boy is featured, and he's shocked to discover that his real mother is in fact the local "ghoul," a wild-eyed witch ostracized and feared by the villagers. It seems at one time she was an outspoken, empowered woman whose choice of both raising a family and having a career -- in this case taking care of the local children's cemetery -- didn't sit well with the rest of the patriarchal community. They condemned her as an evil spirit who cast the evil eye and dug up dead infants and fed her milk to them. How many independent, ambitious women have had to contend with that!
From a less sympathetic point of view, Martial Fougeron's "My Son" looks at another disturbed mother of a 12-year-old. It opens with a shot of an ambulance and a woman's voiceover saying something to the effect that nobody knew things would happen this way and if they did they certainly would have done something about it. So much for irony. What follows is 80 minutes of a bourgeois, Gallic "Mommie Dearest" as Nathalie Baye plays a shrewish mother who psychologically and physically torments her son Julien. Her wimpy husband looks on and Julien's older sister futilely protests and so things just get worse and worse and you know this is going to continue until the kid either tries to kill himself or kill his mothher or both or she tries to kill him. When will the ambulance finally show up? At one point the father slaps Baye and the audience at the screening I attended broke out into cheering. I haven't seen a reaction like that since "Fatal Attraction." I might even have joined in myself.
A couple of contrasts in directorial philosophy, meanwhile. While here I interviewed Mark Fergus, the writer/director of the taut, thoughtful thriller "First Snow." He confessed to having read James Joyce's "Ulysses" over a half dozen times and expressed the hope that some day someone would expand the potential of film as much as Joyce had expanded that of the novel. Later, the festival celebrated the career of Luc Besson in a special tribute at which he said, "Normal books make me sleep. Comic books -- That's the stuff."
March 05, 2007
I've been to a lot of film festivals, but none quite like Miami. At the hotel, for example, pneumatically perfect women lounge topless and nearly bottomless on the chaise lounges and enormous mattresses alongside the lantern-lit pool. Walk down Lincoln Road Mall to the movie theatre and you pass a man with no arms painting with his feet, another man walking six Italian greyhounds, hundreds of scantily clad college students on Spring Break, assorted clowns, tanned panhandlers, myriads of tourists, scores of upscale bistros and boutiques and a million parrots squawling in the palm tress. It's a lot to take in, a lot for the movies to compete with.
And they must also compete against each other. For indeed, once again, I am here as a member of the FIPRESCI (International National Film Critics Jury). So far, I'd say the films have fared pretty well -- I think the key for them is providing less stimulation than the overripe city itself. The Israeli entry "Someone to Run With," for example, had maybe too much going on for its own good. It starts fine with two gradually intersecting storylines -- the first about a young girl who shaves her head (this, for some reason, is the third film I've seen in in the past week in which a character shaves his or head. What does it mean? It doesn't matter) and becomes a street busker in Jerusalem; the second about the dorky teenaged boy who is assigned by the city's animal control department to track down the owner of the girl's dog, recently found i.d.less and abandoned. What happens in between the girl shaving her head and the boy with her dog trying to find her at first appeals to the down-the-rabbit-hole sensibility, but as the two stories converge the plausibility goes out the window. A nice cover of "Wild Horses," though
The other Israeli entry, "Sweet Mud," might have the worst title in the festival but the semi-autobiographical story about a 12-year-old trying to survive in a hellish kibbutz in the 70s offers some genuine emotional moments and some that are contrived and manipulative. It struck me that both movies are in a way the same: in "Someone" a sister must save her addicted brother from a community that on the surface seems idealistic but is in fact corrupt and evil (a kind of inner city school for the performing arts consisting of street kids that's actually a front for a drug ring -- kind of "Fame" crossed with "Oliver Twist" with heroin instead of porridge). In "Mud" it's a son trying to save the addicted mother from the outwardly communal but in fact selfish and venal kibbutz. Are these films trying to tell us something about the current state of Israel? Probably not, at least I'm pretty sure that's not why they were wildly popular with audiences.
Kudos for the least popular film so far go to the Swedish film "God Willing." It's got everything American movie goers hate: subtitles; a non-linear narrative; quirky characters who speak in riddles; a style reminiscent of Godard or maybe Aki Kurasmakki; none of the easy to digest platitudes or political cliches that make similar films like "Babel" or "Crash" palatable. About twenty people walked out. I liked it, of course.
Not as much as British director Andrea Arnold's "Red Road," though. A nightmare look at the age of surveillance and anomie with one of the year's most intense and disturbing sex scenes. It's like "Rear Window" directed by Wenders and Antonioni in which Grace Kelly gets it on with Raymond Burr. Or something like that. The leader so far in the competition. Meanwhile, I'm heading for the pool.
March 01, 2007
Now that he’s finally won a Best Director and Best Picture Oscar
after four decades of brutal, brilliant filmmaking, Martin Scorsese can settle
down and do what he’s always dreamed of -- adapt children’s literature?
Though Scorsese announced on Tuesday that his next project is
a collaboration with Mick Jagger on “The Long Play,” the story of forty years
in the career of two pals in the music business, a recent Variety story has him
working on Brian Selznik’s 526 page innovative picturebook/young adult novel, “The Invention of
Hugo Cabret.” 
Set in 1930 Paris, it’s
the story of a 12-year-old orphan living in the train station who tries to
solve a mystery involving an automaton, his dead father and…Georges Melies! Sounds
like Scorsese’s ouvre in a nutshell. And if Scorsese does indeed take on
“Cabret,” a lot of his storyboarding will already have been done, as the book
is lavished with stunning illustrations including reproductions of Melies
fantasy films from the 1900s, such as “A Trip to the Moon.”
Other fallout from the Oscars includes Best Supporting Actor Alan
Arkin teaming up with Steve Carell, a dream cast for a movie adaptation of
perhaps the funniest sitcom ever made, “Get Smart.” 
Peter Segal of “The Longest Yard” is directing, so
don’t get you’re your hopes up just yet.
Less auspicious is the Weinsteins’ intent to makeover the Oscar
Winning German film “The Lives of Others”
as a Hollywood suspense thriller, exactly what Brett Michel in his Phoenix
review of this grim subtle, no-guns-blazing mini-masterpiece of a Cold War spy drama said should never happem.
But with Anthony Minghella directing,
how exciting could it be? Maybe the Germans should retaliate by adapting “Get
Smart” (perhaps titled “Reissen sich am
Rieman!” as our multi-lingual Arts Editor suggests) as a grim, subtle and
humorless Cold War spy drama.