Friday, 20 April 2001

WEEKEND PREVIEW

This won’t be the traditional Weekend Preview, since I am now in Bermuda after a 10 hour day of travel.   Long day.  The festival, The Bermuda International Film Festival, starts Friday night and the changes that the festival organizers have made are already apparent.  Just a look at the quality of the film program (or "programme," as they would write here) tells you a lot.  And the guest list is looking more like a serious festival.  John Madden, Richard Schickel, Mark Litvak, Victor Loewy, Andrew Herwitz, Peter Rainer, Carrie Rickey, David Sterritt, Kevin Lally and filmmakers like Roco Belic, Justin Kerrigan, Peter Riegert, Slamdance winner Monteith McCollum, Lisa Kors and Amir Bar-Lev, amongst a host of others.

The first full report will be on Monday.  

CENTER OF THE WORLD:  It’s hard damned work making a movie that’s supposed to be this sexy so damned unsexy. 

Before I get mean, I just want to say that I am a fan of much of Wayne Wang’s work.  And given the push-the-limits attitude of the promotional campaign, I was kind of hoping for the sexual version of Smoke or Blue in the Face, where Wang managed to let his actors romp, so that as an audience, we never quite knew what was coming.  Sure, it was indulgent.  But it was lots of fun too. 

Maybe we don’t always know what’s coming in Center of the World.  After all, who could have predicted bad sex?  Who could have predicted that Carla Guigino’s 10 minutes in the film would be the only lively material in the entire movie?  And that the intense sensuality she promised would never be paid off.   Who could have guessed that Molly Parker could be so sexy and yet, never allow the audience a moment of real intimacy?  Who would have guessed that Peter Sarsgaard would be playing a guy who would be perfectly willing to leave Las Vegas?

Wang does use DV to pretty good effect.  It is, for the most part, indistinguishable from film to someone who’s not paying too much attention.  And his work with hand held camera is good, if not overwhelming.  The film seems to have been shot on a set with a few days in Las Vegas for some simple exteriors ... most of which are used up under credits. 

But the idea that this is the Last Tango In Paris of the cyber generation is a bad, film-ignorant joke.  The premise is compelling.  But the answers never come and the questions never really get that interesting.  Had the movie been about the Guigino character who is, in the parlance of Los Angeles, a soft hooker, giving it up now and again to men who give her enough money to help her support herself and her family, it might have been really interesting.  Her life is far more complex than Parker’s character’s.  Parker has all of her options open to her.  She can still run or choose to stay or decide on something in the middle.  Guigino’s character’s life is already a shambles and the web is all too real for her.  Meanwhile, Sarsgaard’s character is so benign and so weak that when he finally feels something deeply, no one is really pushed past any important boundaries.

I think the one-word review is, sadly, "boring."

O NO!!!:  There is a really amazing story about the Othello adaptation, O, that was shifted from Dimension/Miramax to Lion’s Gate a couple of weeks ago.  It’s possible that someone in L.A. is covering this angle today, but one of the most amazing parts of the story is that it’s only come to light in The New York Observer’s The Transom, reported by Rebecca Traister.  (Click here for the story.)

It turns out that the producers of O are actually suing Miramax et al, for not releasing the film within the period of their distribution contract, which apparently had some minimum parameters that Miramax had to meet with the release... 1000 screens and $10 million in P&A.  The magic date was March 17, about 18 months after the original release date, which passed before Miramax made their deal with Lion’s Gate. 

But it gets worse.  The producers of O claim that Miramax not only didn’t support the film, but that they destroyed any ability to capitalize on the cast’s popularity (Julia Stiles, Mekhi Phifer and Josh Hartnett) or the now-outdated soundtrack and, they claim,  that Miramax had made negative statements about the film to the press. 

Now, the centerpiece of Traister’s story - and the part I find least interesting - is that the producers are accusing Harvey Weinstein of doing all of this to make political hay.   Well, duh!   There is the intimation that Harvey may actually have political aspirations of his own.  Yawn.  And Traister misses the most interesting element here by misreporting that it was a Miramax decision to dump Dogma in 1999.  What’s fascinating about this story is that Miramax dumped Dogma because of pressure from above, whereas according to these producers, Harvey took full responsibility for this decision.

Of course, there is the claim that Harvey threatened to ruin these guys if they didn’t sign off on shipping the film to another label.  And there is the intriguing possibility that Miramax may still have the marketing responsibilities for the film being released under the Lion’s Gate banner.  But one thing I can assure the O boys.  This lawsuit will make an enemy of Weinstein that no other action could have inspired.  One thing Mr. Weinstein likes least of all ... being made to look bad in a public forum.

READER OF THE DAY:  Slow connection ...ROTD returns Monday.

E ME:  Will Center of the World’s sexy ad campaign get you into the theater?