September 10, 2002

It’s late again…

This time, it’s Wyclef Jean’s fault.  The party for the premiere of the movie Shottas, which is set in Miami and the Bahamas but was shot almost exclusively in the Bahamas, was scheduled from 10pm to 2:30 am.  I actually wanted to program the film in Miami, but it wasn’t ready.  The reason I was so excited was that it co-stars Wyclef… one of my favorite musicians of this era. 

After a day of four films, a nap and a lovely party c/o Disney (Ellen Pompeo is even skinnier in person… but I still see huge things in her future), you might have thought that I was ready for a quick column and a nap.  But noooooo… Bonnie Volman of Palm Pictures ran into me during the day and invited me to the Wyclef party, at which he was scheduled to perform.  

When I arrived, there were maybe 75 people trying to push their way into the party while the bouncer contingent was using that delightful phrase, “No one else gets in!”  That was, until Usher arrived.  (Didn’t they see She’s All That?  And they still let him in?)  Anyway, I muscled my way in along with a CTV press crew by 11pm or so.  The place was actually near empty. 

11:30 – Most of the crowd seems to get into the club.

11:45 – The CTV truck is towed away by Toronto’s finest.

12:30 – The two women surrounding Alessandro Nivola get their drinks freshened.

12:45 – Wyclef arrives… he is not carrying a guitar.

1am – Jeff Dowd starts trying to talk a redhead into dancing.

1:30 – Wyclef dances a little… and doesn’t seem ready to perform.

2:00 – I decide to leave… when I see Bonnie outside, I say, “Oh well, I guess he’s not going to perform.”  She says, “I wouldn’t assume that.”

2: 20 – The party is about to end and besides the scent of marijuana in the club, there is no evidence of Mr. Jean.

2:24 – Wyclef grabs a mike… and kicks ass for 20 minutes.

And so, dear reader, at 3:20am, I am buzzed, I have a headache and I am too buzzed to sleep.  Thus, the column…

Monday started with exhaustion and a mistake.  I made my way into the Varsity theaters, where most of the press screenings take place… only it wasn’t where Better Luck Tomorrow, the Justin Lim film I intended to start my day with was.  The lovely Shannon Truesch was there to offer me press notes and a smile, so I must have been in the right place.  I guess I should have looked at the title of the film on the notes… or maybe the fact that the movie already had started even though it was ten minutes before its scheduled start.

So, I missed the first two minutes of Once Upon A Time In The Midlands.

The actors I saw on screen during the credits, Ricky Tomlinson and Kathy Burke, were enough to make me want to stay.  But then, I saw Rhys Ifans, Robert Carlyle and Shirley Henderson and I figured that I was in good hands.

And “good” is the proper word.  Once Upon A Time In the Midlands is another well-made piffle.   Cute, funny, good enough.  It’s hard to imagine that OUATITM is good enough to make much of an impact in the U.S. in its Sony Classics release, but I suspect that the price was right and that the video rights will assure profit domestically on their own.

It’s a pretty basic story… Ifans is Dek, a milquetoast but loving husband to single mother Shirley, played by Shirley Henderson.  Carlyle is the macho ex who is inspired to return to his wife and daughter after four years away.  Tomlinson and Burke are Shirley’s in-laws - Burke is Carlyle’s sister in the film – who remain close to Shirley while being as distant as could be from Carlyle.  Current comfortable love and passionate mad love conflict.

Nice movie.  Good performances all around.  Nothing too special.  I didn’t see Bend It Like Beckham yet, but I still like it better.

You know, Catherine Breillat was feted a number of times last year as her film Fat Girl arrived as a pathetic disappointment after Romance, which many of us felt was quite daring and brilliant.  All the adulation seems to have gone right to Ms. Breillat’s already bulging ego.

In most Breillat movies, at least one woman ends up masturbating on screen.  In Sex Is Candy, her newest, Breillat herself manages to jerk off for 92 long minutes and never comes… she actually seems to fake herself into thinking she’s had an artistic orgasm.  But all she really gets is an emotional teenage girl who cries when the male actor in her deflowering scene does or does not – whichever way, he’s right there – penetrate her with his made-for-the-film fake erect penis. 

Brava, Catherine!

Imagine a movie about the last years of Orson Welles in which he hires Tom Cruise to play “Morson” and gives the actor line after line about how scary directing a movie is and how brave he is to move forward at all and just what a genius he really is.  Given that it would be Orson Welles, it would be horribly self-indulgent, but somewhere in the range of the almost acceptable.  But Ms. Breillat is no Orson Welles.  She’s barely Orson Bean. 

Of course, she commits the greatest sin of all in Sex Is Comedy… she bored me to jokes.  I mean, really, by the end her on-screen persona reminded me more of Pepe Le Pew than of a truly smart, feminist director.  And I kept thinking that although Anne Parillaud did a good job with the role, Breillat would have a better movie had she hired an actress who looks more like Breillat looks… nice looking, but unexceptional… and squeezed into her usually overtight jeans and tops.  Not that there’s anything wrong with a woman being built like a woman.  But Parillaud is rail thin and a true beauty.  When she sleeps with her 20something assistant, there’s nothing shocking about it.  She’s a hottie.  Yet Breillat’s whole point seems to be what a genius she is… which is lost. 

I have a similar issue with Kim Basinger in 8 Mile… which I won’t be reviewing right now because all the short lead outlets who attended the screening – with one notably poopy exception – agreed that this was not the time.  But I can tell you that the well-made film, which is likely to split audience opinion along unexpected lines, had a hard time convincing me that Basinger, who was perfectly willing to use her considerable femininity to get a free ride from a man, couldn’t manage an upgrade from the family trailer on the wrong side (the white side, actually) of the road, 8 Mile. 

In fact, I think I can say that I speak for many single men when I say, “Any single mothers who look like Kim Basinger or Robin Wright Penn and have one sweet, quiet daughter… I have a guest room and a king sized bed.”

Okay, with that out of the way… MAX.

Wow.  I didn’t know what to expect.  The buzz in the air was that this was a comedic, sometimes dramatic look at the evolution of Adolph Hitler, played by Noah Taylor.  Well, it was more like a dramatic, occasionally comedic look at Hitler and his relationship with Max Rothman, a jewish art dealer of such notables as Max Ernst, Paul Klee and Georg Grosz. 

I don’t want to tell you too much, but the thing that really took me by surprise about this film was how gentle and lovely and emotionally complex this journey was.  Max has only one arm, having lost his right arm in service for his country.  He has his own shattered dreams and challenging aspirations to deal with before Hitler stumbles into his life.  And so begins the waltz for both men.  Nothing is obvious, yet nothing has that feel of a film trying to be different for the sake of its own preciousness. 

Cusack is at the top of his game as a man of breeding, taste and real caring.  Noah Taylor has his career-best role and hits it out of the park.  And supporting actresses Leelee Sobieski and Molly Parker shine… especially Sobieski, who convincingly plays a post-teen woman for the first time I remember.  

Menno Meyjes, who has had a very successful career as a screenwriter, does a solid job behind the camera, never getting caught trying too hard or missing any of the basic rules of filmmaking.  Actually, that’s damning with too-faint praise.  He does an excellent job.  He’s not a style guy and he doesn’t quite have the strokes of Brad Silberling or White Oleander’s Peter Kosminsky.  But really nice work.  And, as a writer of an original script, he’s almost like the sane version of Charlie Kaufman.  His work provokes, but never chafes. 

I’m looking forward to seeing Max again and again.  I don’t have the passion for it that I have for City of God, but I can feel it staying with me… and it lingers still…

Finally, I saw Stevie, the new documentary from Hoop Dreams director Steve James.  No, it’s not an auto-doc.  However, James is a character in Stevie’s life and he is very much a part of the film.

I want to be fair to Stevie because I appreciate James and documentaries and I want to love it to death.  But while it was well worth seeing, it didn’t have the lift that I might have liked, literally and figuratively.  I mean “the lift” literally in that the film does not come to a satisfying ending… at least not for me.  And figuratively, the film doesn’t quite have the central character to be unforgettably burned into your brain, frame–by-frame. 

Stevie is a white-trash kind of guy in his early thirties when Steve James comes back into his life.  You see, SJ was Stevie’s Big Brother for five years back in the early 80s.  Stevie’s troubles are extensive, from basic poverty to having been abused as a child.  His mother is out of touch, even though she lives less than 100 yards away from Stevie.  He’s been in and out of prison over the years.  And he is in love with a physically challenged woman. (I use the PC phrase not to be PC, but because I don’t recall exactly what her ailment is.)

And soon after we meet him, we find that he has a much bigger problem... he has been accused of molesting his six-year-old (5? 7? 8?) niece.  This brings his family’s myriad issues to the fore and poses a 20-year-long threat to Stevie’s liberty.

I did like this film.  And I can see how it would have a very powerful effect on some audiences.  But I think that Steve James failed in his effort to do a strong job with his own presence in the film.  It’s not that I don’t think that it’s okay for a documentarian to be in his own movies.  It’s fine.  But it is challenging.  And while I think James meant well by not overwhelming the film with his personal positions about Stevie, he was enough a part of the story that his personal journey must have been more complex than offered in this film.  And I wanted to know.  I also wanted him to investigate the nightmares of Stevie’s life more aggressively.  And major, ugly moments were passed by so quickly that not everyone even heard that certain things happened.

Stevie will get a lot of attention.  And it will deserve it.  But I don’t see it as this year’s Hoop Dreams or even anything close.  These are not characters that are going to find an easy home in the hearts of Academy members.  But do check it out.

And now, I’m going to check out.  It’s 4:24 in T-dot.  You know, Wyclef announced where his hotel suite was and invited the crowd to join him.  But he seemed to have two conditions to make it past the door… a vagina and some pot.  I have neither.  Well, at least I’ll get some rest.

READER OF THE DAY: No one really wrote much of note about anything other than the column of 9/11.

E ME:  I suspect I will write a column tomorrow night for Wednesday… but it will be about movies, not That Day.  I am not a believer that the film business has changed one f-ing iota since the events of that day and that except for getting onto lots, only the distribution of ten movies or less were truly effected. 

Now, send me an e-mail that I can print, damn it!  Or the terrorists will have already won!  (Sorry… couldn’t resist.)