September 10, 2003

Some days, you just don’t know what to write…

I seem to be having the same conversations over and over and over again at this festival. The movies have been good, but not great. The press office is too far away. And the one consensus favorite is a doc… Touching The Void. Yadda, yadda, yadda.

Tuesday was a little sluggish, as the midnight screening of Underworld left me needing too much sleep to see my early movie of the day and then, another scheduling screw-up (100 people wanting to see Chris Smith, Sarah Price and Dan Ollman’s doc, The Yes Men and being shut out) left me without an early afternoon movie. A chat with the writer of 21 Grams was followed closely by a screening of Shattered Glass, an excellent HBO movie that is destined for a brief theatrical release, albeit, not the distributor’s intention.

You will be reading about some hissing in one theater where a press screening of In The Cut was happening. It was not deserved. The film is imperfect, despite great stylishness, a brooding Mark Ruffalo, an amalgam of every slut that Jennifer Jason Leigh has ever played and Meg Ryan offering both an onanistic display and a significant amount of face time with her breasts. I really don’t feel like getting into it right now, but I will say that Jane Campion’s intent to reach for a new take on Looking For Mr. Goodbar that has a post-feminist sensibility that does't blame women for their carnal desires was more compelling than the result.

As for Young Adam, I mostly wish to offer a little advice to Mrs. Emily Nivola nee’ Mortimer. Keep your clothes on for a while. Please. I have enjoyed seeing her body verbally dissected by Dermot Mulrooney and I can’t really complain about watching her willingly strip naked to have a fling with an ex in gravelly mud under a truck. She is a beautiful woman and we now know that she makes noises from her nose and not from her throat during sex.

Great.

But I respect Ms. Mortimer as an actress and a human being (as well as her husband, Alessandro Nivola, last seen on the big screen baring his ass in Laurel Canyon) and I don’t want her to be reduced to this season’s piece of ass. (Similar note to the young woman playing Sir Tony’s first wife in The Human Stain… show us your pubic hair on screen one more time and you officially become the next Kari Wuhrer, not the next Jennifer Connelly.) Your other performance showing here at the fest, in Bright Young Things, has you playing a wild beauty that doesn’t like sex. That’s not enough to create balance. A character as complex as the one in Lovely & Amazing is worthy of nudity. But following it up as the hot chick who has sex in the mud is little more than a bunch of roles as the hot chick who has sex in some other unusual situation and suddenly, you are the lead of Showgirls 2. Don’t let it happen. Keep the clothes on for at least 3 or 4 movies. After all, we can’t all be Ewan McGregor. (And yes ladies, Mark Ruffalo’s penis does have a cameo in In The Cut.)

I really did enjoy my chats with Ridley Scott and Yaphet Kotto, but now does not feel like the moment to write about them.

I am greatly looking forward to Nathalie… and Intermission, the much buzzed Colin Farrell film.

Despite some exhaustion, there is a lot more festival to come. The Republic of Love, The Brown Bunny, the Jon Demme doc The Agronomist, Mike Hodges’ I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead, Undead, Zatoichi, Festival Express and Dallas 362 are just a few of the late festival titles on the way and on my schedule.

I hope I feel more like writing tonight..