September 16, 2002

Tomorrow, the Toronto wrap-up… Wednesday, the first Oscar preview column… Today, the weekend…

This was a weekend of both feast and famine at the festival.  I saw five movies on Friday and just two on Saturday.  I enjoyed my traditional attendance at the final screening of the festival, though this year, the film was infinitely more hype than glory.

But let’s start with one of the good ones… good enough to survive an 8:30am screening time… Denzel Washington’s directorial debut, Antwone Fisher.  Well done.  While everyone was scurrying around trying to figure out how to embrace Matt Dillon’s overlong, otherwise decent directing debut, there was no need for equivocation about Washington’s work.  He made a major studio film on a mini-major budget.  And while has a lot to thank cinematographer Philippe Rousselot and other collaborators for, the simplicity of style suggests less reliance on others from this novice director.

The story is true, written by Antwone Fisher himself.  Newcomer Derek Luke works an emotional range from subdued to ferocious that is likely to make him a Golden Globe nominee, where the list is ten actors long.  And Washington plays the Robin-Williams-Good-Will-Hunting role as the therapist who has to unlock the man’s soul.  Unlike Williams, however, Washington does not get any big scenes, although you can always feel his powerful presence.  He does get a wife,  and their relationship, which was clearly designed to act as an emotional parallel between the obviously closed-down Fisher and the quietly closed-down therapist, is the only thing in the picture that really doesn’t work.  And, amazingly enough, Washington acknowledged just that when he spoke to a festival press conference on Friday. 

But the core of this movie is Fisher and the story is powerful.  Washington’s directorial work is a little too cerebral for his own good at times.  Derek Luke gives him the whole parade, so the movie works emotionally.  But it was almost as though Washington is afraid of the Fickle Finger of Corn pointed at him.  All in all, this is the best debut behind the camera from a major actor since, probably, Tim Robbins.

And there is LA FROMAGE du DePALMA…

Oui.  The scent of day-old cheese is never far away from Femme Fatale, a movie that takes itself too seriously to believe it when it tells you not to take it so seriously.  Of course, that’s the argument that the film’s supporters seem to have latched onto.  “It’s just good, noir-y fun.”  Well, perhaps.  And perhaps a movie that is as universally accepted as crap as Original Sin has to be hailed in that light as a superior movie. 

Original Sin has better costumes, better sex scenes, a better story and a much better performance from Antonio Banderas.  The only thing that it was missing was a director of DePalma’s skills and reputation. 

I sat and listened to the Femme Fatale press conference, praying for answers to my confusion about how a man who used to make such interesting films has become so blind to the basics of storytelling.  Sadly, there was nothing to ease my pain.  It seems that Mr. DePalma knew exactly what kind of smoke he was blowing.  He kept repeating the – is it me or is this idiotic? – notion that noir couldn’t work in this era unless it was somehow part of a dreamscape.  He admitted that just watching Rebecca Romijn-Stamos and her long-legged counterpart Rie Rasmussen walk was enough to get him off… and that shows in the picture.  And, bizarrely, he seemed unable to recall Basic Instinct when asked whether platinum blondes are now the standard in “bad girls.”

The story of La Femme Fromage is simple… bad, bad girl takes part in a robbery and then uses others to get away with the deed.  Banderas is the schmuck that she uses, for sex and her other more nefarious needs.  But there are more holes in the logic… even if you accept one giant, ludicrous DePalma plot twist… are extraordinary. 

For all the talk of steamy sex scenes between Banderas and Romijn-Stamos, the duo doesn’t generate enough heat to iron a shirt and in terms of just-plain-sex, it mostly consists of the long-legged Becky stripping with a lanquidness with which I would never believe this normally game gamine capable.  There is a girl-girl scene… which never seems to get below the belt… this from the man who shocked America with masturbation scenes in the 80s featuring Angie Dickinson (and her body double) and Melanie Griffith (in Body Double.)

And for all the talk of the use of the Cannes Film Festival, the actual festival takes up about three minutes of screen time in this overly long 114 minute film. 

On the other hand, literally, there is KEN PARK. 

Ken Park is one of this movies that people defend because it is “daring” and “fearless.”  It dares to show a boy masturbate from first arousal to orgasm.  It dares to show a threesome in action – incidentally featuring the director’s adolescent girlfriend as the creamy filling.  It dares to let teens graphically kill people.  It dares to show a father performing oral sex on his son – never mind that there was no hint of any incest or even confused sexuality up until the blow job.  It dares to have a father “marry” his daughter so she can fill in where her deceased mother left off. 

Dare, dare, dare, dare, dare, dare, dare, dare, dare, dare…

How about giving us a reason for all this ugliness?  At least Kids and Bully purported to have a story to tell, while Clark’s camera lingered on breasts and buttocks and inner thighs, both male and female.   This turd is just a self-indulgent nihilistic nightmare of masturbation fantasies by an old man for old men who can rationalize the abuse of the work itself away. 

The greatest question behind Ken Park is why a respected guy like Ed Lachman wanted to have anything to do with it.  Kids are unhappy and they have sex and do drugs… NEXT!!!!

Worst of all, like Femme Fatale, Ken Park is boring.  Like the worst of Michael Bay, this film leaves you waiting for the next shocker, as though a 17-year-old banging two friends is just another CG come shot. 

IRREVERSIBLE, however, is a whole different ballgame.  Placed by many in the same realm as Ken Park, since it includes a 7, 8 or 9 minute rape scene (everyone seems to report a different length). But Gaspar Noe, brutal though his film is, is working on some very interesting ground.

Let me start with some of the big surprises, not on a story level, but on an ethical level.

The infamous rape scene is done as tastefully as an anal rape could be done.  It is horrifying and it is upsetting, but Noe is actually quite clever in objectifying Monica Bellucci in that scene as little as possible.   Her breasts are never exposed.  There is never a suggestion of foreplay or any enjoyment on her part.  In fact, he also takes away all the traditional arguments that plague rape victims… she screams throughout, she keeps fighting even with a knife as a threat, she says “no” in every way possible and when she has the opportunity, she tries her best to escape.  And that’s when the most violent part of the scene takes place.  For me, it was infinitely more horrible to see the beating. 

But while covering Bellucci and not trying to titillate, Noe demands that the audience pay attention.  The rape takes place in a long street underpass and Noe makes sure that we know that someone might turn up at the end of that hallway at any moment.  So we can’t look away, as most of us would. 

But there is a lot more to this film than the rape scene. Noe seems to be, most shockingly, a moralist… perhaps a right-wing moralist.  Noe offers both the rape victim and her boyfriend, a runaway locomotive in his own right, the opportunities to make better choices… the opportunity to change what is, by the time the story starts, irreversible. 

If you can get past the horrible violence, which starts right at he beginning of the film, long before the rape sequence, there is a story here that wants to make you think… and unlike Ken Park, not just about the idea that teens are rebellious, horny and look good naked.  Ms. Bellucci and Vincent Cassell (as the boyfriend) are better looking and more interesting sexually than any of the teens in Ken Park.  Yet, even when they are having sex in a romantic, sweet setting, there is more emotional richness and context here than in any of the show-off machinations of Clark and Lachman’s excremental opus. 

Of course, Noe is a show off too.  And his camera work tends to cross the border from archly creative to repetitively boring at some points.  But there is so much more there than the pieces that make good copy.  Irreversible is a movie in which after we have seen Monica Bellucci brutally raped and then seen her unrelentingly sexy in a slip of a dress, sheerly covering her singular ripeness, a character asks whether a man who really loved her would even let her leave the house looking like that and whether her man got off on her looking like that in public.  And, as an audience, we ponder it all… sexism, feminism, freedom of expression, the definitions of love, what we really want and what we say we want and so much more.  That is something special.  And Irreversible is just that… something very difficult and something very special indeed.

Another emotionally violent experience was THE MAGDALENE SISTERS, of which I was unfortunate to have only caught 20 minutes.  But in those 30 minutes, you could see Peter Mullan’s skills as a director (and as a cameo actor).  You could see what fine choices he made in casting.  And you could feel the darkness hanging over this movie.  I will see the rest of the film as soon as possible.  Miramax has the film for distribution.  After the film won at Venice and with the studio already fending off public attacks about the film supposedly being anti-Christian, it will be interesting to see how quickly and aggressively the studio gets this one out.

A frothy but filling documentary on the making of what would become Disney’s The Emperor’s New Groove called THE SWEATBOX was a treat.  Interestingly, the director wondered after the screening whether the film was bringing out more anti-Disney emotions from the crowd than expected.  But from the perspective of someone who knows much of the story and the after-effects, I thought the film was stunningly generous.  I didn’t get to discuss this with the filmmakers, but they acknowledge that Disney had some veto power that was not exercised against the film.  A bit more bitterness and perhaps there would have been some. 

In any case, the story takes us from early pre-production, centering on Sting’s involvement and spirals into a saga of the kinds of massive changes that happened on this project (starting as The Kingdom of the Sun, then The Kingdom In The Sun and finally, The Emperor’s New Groove.)  We get to see Luke Wilson record his version of Pacha… back when he was a young character, before he became John Goodman.  We get a look at the early, more sophisticated, Sting songs, particularly one done by Eartha Kitt with a lot more subtext.  We get to see a co-director of The Lion King resign his job as director.  We get to see Schneider & Schumacher do what they do best… and worst… which cost Schneider his job seven months after Groove was released.

The nice and not-so-nice thing about this film is that the filmmakers are as bright-eyed and optimistic as Sting when he starts.  But like Sting, cynicism clearly seeps in to the filmmaking as much as it does for the songwriter.  And as in life, even that turns, as Sting finds some delight in the final creation – not what he signed up for, but something fun and joyous in and of itself. 

Part of me wanted the film to use its sharpened blades and to make some tough points.  There are no mentions of Dinosaur or Atlantis or even the also-Incan-themed The Road to El Dorado from DreamWorks and how that must have influenced some of the choices.  The film even goes on to suggest that $150 million worldwide for a Disney animated film is “good.”  Uh, no.  But another part of me just enjoyed this circuitous ride from the eyes of someone who just happened upon the Burbank Magic Kingdom. 

Okay… tomorrow, a wrap-up of the sixty-plus Toronto Film Festival films I saw, the films I should have seen but didn’t, a look at the current state of the festival and of indie film in general and the First Annual THB TIFF Awards.  Until then…

READER OF THE DAY:  SSSSsssss writes:  “I saw "Roger Dodger" on Tuesday night at the Boston Film Festival. The director Dylan Kidd was on hand and did a brief Q & A after the film.

Kidd writes bright, incisive, and funny dialogue, and Campbell gives a very good performance. My initial reaction was that while I liked the film, and laughed throughout, it doesn't really add up to anything significant in the end in terms of depth of emotion, etc. etc. My initial reaction may have been too harsh given that the film does try to capture something beyond Scott's dogma on women and dating. What it captures beneath the bravado is essentially a lonely man approaching middle age without much to hang on to.

In the Q & A after the film Kidd stated that the original ending was going to be Scott smoking the cigarette the next morning after his nephew Nick has left. But, Kidd felt that we had invested too much in Roger, and he wanted to give the movie the additional scenes at Nick's home and high school. The additional scenes give the movie a quasi-happy ending, in that it appears that Roger and Nick have an emotional bond, and maybe Roger will translate that into a successful relationship or whatever-it certainly softens the character's hard edges.

The original ending described above may be superior, but it is undeniably harder and Roger's isolation and loneliness are staring back at you. I don't mind the added scenes, I don't think they diminish the film at all.

By the way, and ignore this if you already know this information, Kidd gave the script to Scott after seeing him in a coffee shop in NYC. Kidd had tried to give the script to other "name" actors he had seen around the city, but they had politely told him they could not accept unsolicited scripts.

E ME:  Back in L.A…. back to bidness… what have I missed?