Notes from the Tribeca Film Festival Underground

This Tribeca Film Festival is on, and I live on 12th St. and 2nd Ave, across the street from one and a block away from another theaters at which it was being held, so I am hereby appointing myself Bright Lights After Dark's accidental man on the scene!

SATURDAY - 8 AM-- Still awake after an all night video editing session, I go outside to score some diet Pepsi and there, chipper as can be, are about 8 volunteer intern-ushers standing around in the dead middle of the empty sidewalk, with their laminates and clipboards, surveying the long rows of cold gray metal ticket line dividers across the street from my door. They're looking at me as if I'm trying to grab a comp ticket to the new Guy Maddin flick. Dudes, no one is on the street! Your gray line dividing stalls are empty. Now give me a fuckin' comp ticket to the new Guy Maddin...

Tribeca Film Festival is just awash in Am Ex sponsorship, oh and some idiotically pretentious beer whose name I am proud to say they've failed to make stick in my head. Stella Artois? D'oh! This beer is so pretentious that the bartender will stop the train just to pour it off the tap without too much foam. Target demographic? ex-frat boy Wall Streeters still wet behind the ears. What do they have to do with cinema? Promoters clearly don't know how to "brand" this film festival so it becomes an extension of the whole cigars-steaks-sports-American Psycho aesthetic.

SATURDAY - 2 PM -- After a long nap, I go out to buy cigarettes. My neighborhood, Manhattan's East Village, once a haven for weird artist types, has become a combination NYU campus and Asian ex-pat drinking ground. Now I know how the Parisians must have felt when they had Earnest Hemingway and F. Scott lording it around back in the 1920s, flush with exchange rate relative wealth. I feel like some crying Native American watching the litter along the highway.

The question is, what are all these bleached Midwestern tourists doing this far down from Times Square? Suddenly it hits me like the cold rush off a dirty crack pipe: Am Ex and that stupid beer have turned Tribeca Film Festival into a tourist attraction, ala Mardi Gras, "jazz fest" and-- not long from now I imagine--Burning Man. Dudes! Can you imagine soccer moms with five kids and their same-aged best friends (they all get to bring one along-- so ten kids total) all clinging to each other and treating each new environment as if another new store at the local mall as they walk through Burning Man, or like, 1970 Altamont? Oh Hell's Angel's dagger, where is thy sting?

Don't these tourists realize that you can't just "see" the festival? You have to pick your movies wisely and the good ones are sold out by the director's friends six days before you get there? Hmmm, maybe they're the relatives of the film crews on these "underdog" indies. Either way, I just don't get it. Most of the stuff on the roster is usually unsigned for a reason. Some are great, most are padded shorts seething with unconscious film grad misogyny.

Now it's Wednesday, another beautiful gray dawn... and still the volunteers in the laminates stand awaiting... waiting for their stalls to be filled. And me, I'm just an ordinary guy on his way to his ordinary job, who just happens to be living right across the street... just one of five million stories in the naked city.

Walt & Annie & Julianne

Continuing her series of commissions for the Walt Disney megacorp, Annie Leibovitz photographs Julianne Moore as The Little Mermaid.

Somewhere, Hans Christian Anderson is smiling.

[Thanks to Nathaniel R for the tip.]

Hillary & Kumar Escape From Baby Obama Mama

Sometimes it seems like the question frequently posed by the media, "Who is more electable, Hillary or Obama?" is simply code for asking, "Is America more sexist, or more racist?"

This weekend we may have a chance to find out. Two comedies are opening - one, Harold & Kumar Escape From Guantanamo Bay, starring two Non-White Americans, and the other, Baby Mama, starring two Non-Male Americans. I daresay whichever movie motivates more people to leave their homes to buy tickets might be a good indicator of which candidate will motivate more voters to show up at the polls.

Rime of the Ancient Mariner

It is an Ancient Mariner, And he stoppeth one of three.`By thy long beard and glittering eye, Now wherefore stopp'st thou me?

If I were a cartoonist, i.e., if I could actually draw, I’d love to publish a political cartoon depicting Navy man John McCain as Coleridge’s “Ancient Mariner.”

And who would I depict as the Albatross around his neck?

Why George W. Bush, of course!

Then again, how many people these days have read Rime of the Ancient Mariner? Probably just the “educated elite” who are going to vote for Obama anyway. Oh well.

[Engraving by Gustave Doré.]

Happy 80th Birthday, Shirley Temple!

Shirley Temple, the Youngest, Most Sacred Monster of the Cinema in Her Time (Salvador Dalí, 1939).

See also, Graham Greene on Shirley Temple - via David Ehrenstein here.

Take this unborn child and shove it!

Is it just me or is there a distinctly pro-life vibe seeping into our once so "liberal" cinema? This JUNO business has all us population control enthusiasts worried sick, and now LIFE BEFORE HER EYES profers the notion that the best way to atone for an abortion is by sacrificing yourself in a Columbine-style massacre. The word "slut" is used in the film as a cross of light that leads Wood to realize the one who needs to survive is the fundamentalist virgin gal pal not her pot-smokin' free-lovin' self. Oops, did I spoil the ending? I could be wrong, but the one bumper sticker in the film conspicuously reads "Choose Life." Uma Thurman is the older version of the sinner lady, and Evan Rachel Wood is the younger. Both are magnifique! But oh brother.

The movie itself is quite well-done in its nonlinear fashion. The editor has a field day slowing down the speed as Wood dives into pool after pool, her hair slowly undulating in the clear blue water. Her lithe body in red bikini taut in her dive, arms akimbo in eternal crucifixion stance. It's a fine old high school chick version of JACOB'S LADDER, but the pro-life sediment never really settles to the bottom, leaving a weird haze over everything. Am I too quick to smell the dystopian HANDMAID'S TALE-style neo-con funded backwards slide into female oppression taking root, as it always does, in our cinema? Am I as foolish in wanting to protect our women from slavery as they are foolish in presuming that smother-love is at all ennobling? Self-denial is, in the end, always the grossest form of indulgence. The only truly free spirit in the film, the young daughter (Gabrielle Brennan) laughs in mama Uma's face for being so martyr-ish and worried all the time. It's a cool scene, as the film is clearly divided as to whether Uma's skittish mom is right or not to fear losing her perfect little small-town grip, but it ultimately can't atone for the sinister subtext.

Adding to the unsettling sense of foreboding, one of the previews before LIFE was for THEN SHE FOUND ME, a Helen Hunt vehicle where she's pregnant though looks like she's pushing 50 and miserable and pinched you sense the kid cringing in the corner a priori to even being born. The issue is not her health or her deep-set frown lines, but the fact she really loves "perfect man" Colin Firth but its slovenly Matthew Broderick's baby. As in the odious STEEL MAGNOLIAS, it's the child that comes first; moms don't mind sacrificing themselves if it means their man can have a little baby to look after with their new, younger wife. In fact it only increases their value in the eyes of God... and Oscar.

Far more inspiring was THE FALL preview, about a man who tells psychedelic bedtime stories to a little girl in exchange for opiates. They show more rapport in their couple of seconds worth of exchanges than all the hand-wringing worrying mommyhoods and daddynesses in all the rest of this namby pamby stuff out there. I'm not saying drugs make you bond better with your kids, only that no kid likes a parent to be a whining, over-protective martyr. Cinema, give us back our 1970s dads!

Hazel Court (1926-2008)

Most fondly remembered for the two films she did for Terence Fisher - The Curse of Frankenstein (1957) and The Man Who Could Cheat Death (1959) - and the three films she did for Roger Corman - Premature Burial (1962), The Raven (1963, above), and The Masque of the Red Death (1964). This stunning English redhead was sometimes cast as a villainess, but was at her most striking as an icon of mature sexuality offered in contrast to a more "innocent" ingenue. That was precisely the role she played in her finest film, The Masque of the Red Death, as consort to Prince Prospero (Vincent Price), threatened by the arrival of young Jane Asher, another redhead, both of them photographed in gorgeous Technicolor by the best cinematographer Corman ever worked with, Nicolas Roeg.

Lush, vibrant, unique ... unforgettable.

BLUE CRUSH is my Oyster Cult.

Spring is here, so I took the time recently to reappraise BLUE CRUSH, the 2002 girl power surfing flick starring Kate Bosworth. Man, now more than ever, we need girl power films like this. They should RE-release it in theaters, on IMAX.

The common critical response to the film at the time was that the awesome photography more than made up for the trite story and bland acting, but critics have always had a hard time with accepting truly free girl characters (God knows I've written enough on that subject in my past Lindsay defenses, so won't launch into another tirade). If you can look past the surface colloquialisms and girlishness, this is practically a Howard Hawks film: overlapping dialogue; strong camaraderie, good sense of continuity and pace; issues of courage, maturity and nobility (there's no bad guys in BLUE CRUSH). It's all there, and best of all, the issue of romance getting in the way of your dreams--yeah you heard me, getting in the way of your dreams, girls--is handled with care and ballsy skill. How many films can handle real girls kicking ass like this? Maybe three.

Matthew Davis plays the vacationing quarterback who romances Hawaiian surf rate Ann Marie (Kate Bosworth) causing her to lose focus right before the big bad pipe competition. Michelle Rodriqguez is her best friend and trainer who sees what's happening and knows Ann Marie is just scared she'll hit her head on the coral reef, like she did last time. And real-life surf champ Sanoe Lake is, just, well, awesome; she's a natural star and makes a perfect third in their posse, letting her surf sisters carry the emotional weight while she brings sandy authenticity and a deeply entrenched-in-the-termite-moment joi de vivre. When she rolls out of bed to answer the phone (The first thing anyone asks isn't "how are you?" but "how are the waves?") you feel like you're right in bed with her, covered in sand, and still drunk from falling asleep three minutes before.

Also good are the local boy surfers; they sound like it's taking a bit of effort of shout coherent English, but that's fine; the friction of both professional and sexual animosity/desire between them and the girls in the surf community is kept nice and ambiguous; it's more sexual than Frankie and Annette but not "little girl victim" time, like THIRTEEN. When Ann Marie tries to pull her 15-year old sister out of a local bad boy-packed beach party (their mom abandoned them and blah blah), there's no clear sense of either safety or danger, so we're put in the position of wondering whether Ann Marie is being an over-protective projectin' bitch or not trying to drag her home. That's rare and good in this genre, which usually has to spell out danger with ominous music cues and crack pipes or safety with hairbrush karaoke. Similarly, the Cinderella/Pretty Woman escape offered by the quarterback is allowed to have good and bad points. Nothing is certain, not even the outcome of the pipeline contest, and that's what makes this a true blue winner.

Plus, there's even a surreal horror element when you see this one dude surfing wearing Kate Bosworth's face. CREEPY! Oh, and Faizon Love shows off his awesome black belly! Percs like these abound, dude. I'm dead serious, hook thyself.

Why Can't We all just Morally Compromise?

I had to watch this odd romantic-ish comedy last night called SEX AND DEATH 101. Many other critics have been bashing it, calling it uneven and it can't decide what it wants to be. It runs around trying to please all comers... it serves you rom com wussiness, then makes fun of it -- it gets metaphysical then wipes it all away with been-there done-that Farelly-style sex gags. The worst part is that my beloved Winona Ryder returneth here, as a serial killer named "Death Nell." She's awesome once she finally gets to show her face. There's a long, great little scene in a diner at the end, with Death Nell and her latest victim, who goes to her willingly, ala the end of DEATH TAKES A HOLIDAY. Ryder is so sexy crazy she give Marilyn Monroe circa THE MISFITS a run for her money.

But this is where it gets annoyingly "moral" - i.e. she doesn't "really" kill anyone, which for a serial killer is the lamest example of moral cop out since the altered ending of HANNIBAL. See, this chick sleeps with smug misogynists, then sends them into comas via some weird herbal drug... so who knows? they might wake up... oh brother. Check, please!

There's a new movie coming out by David Ayer, co-written with Jammes Ellroy, called STREET KINGS. These two guys are like the only ones working in the entertainment industry who a) write convincing drug-dealer dialogue and b) aren't afraid of backing up morally compromised protagonists (others being the Coens and Paul Thomas Anderson, Tarantino and Rodriguez, John Dahl, Ferrara and sometimes Oliver Stone). Hopefully it will do better than Ayer's last film, the underseen and underappreciated Christian Bale epic, HARSH TIMES.

But man, SEX AND DEATH 101 makes you appreciate the need for directors to trust their audience to be able to "half-root for, half root-against" a complex character, to come away from a movie uneasy and fascinated, rather than just exhausted and sleepy. If they doubt it's possible, they should read some Shakespeare, or Tennessee Williams, or something.

I'm not saying there's not plenty of morally compromised protagonists floating around the cinema, for there surely are - and they often get Oscars for it too, while the films that back-pedal usually get dumped mostly to dvd straight up. So if the idea of a girl serial killer preying on manwhores and perverts sounds awesome, just be aware that fear of females killing in cold blood runs deep up in the patriarchy to the point that even most liberals start kicking in their stalls over it, lots of actresses even refuse to do it. That's fine, but when that fear-desire combo is exploited then wimped out on at the ninth inning with all the coma victims waking up as rested as could be, then man, you know your movie SUCKS, as in sucks up to the neo-con power structure like a Britney-pimpin' BITCH!

Attention Scott Brothers - Remake This!

A number of obituaries for the late Charlton Heston have raved over the Saturday matinee pleasures of the 1954 pulp classic, The Naked Jungle, in which Heston co-starred with Eleanor Parker, above. Produced by George Pal and directed by Byron Haskin (who had previously teamed to make the 1953 War of the Worlds), the film has a great hook – one macho man versus a legion of South American army ants. Guess who wins.

The film was based on a short story, Leiningen Versus the Ants by Carl Stephenson, that had previously been dramatized - with great success - as a radio play featuring William Conrad. The man versus ants theme was a natural for radio.

Which brings me to the point of this post - why hasn’t this movie been remade? Given that Hollywood has remade practically every other pulp classic you can think of, I am astonished that no one has thought to redo this one. (I’m not counting quasi-remakes like Phase IV or Empire of the Ants.) Seems like it would be perfect for one of the Scott Brothers, either Tony or Sir Ridley, starring one of their favorite leading men, Denzel Washington or Russell Crowe.

Who would you like to see fighting for his life against 10 million CGI army ants?

Happy 100th Birthday Bette

Bette Davis would have been a hundred this past Saturday, and over on her indispensible Sunset Gun, Kim Morgan celebrates via a round-up of some of diva Davis's most bad-ass bitchiest moments:

"She was a doll -- a doll that could easily contend with Chucky, but a doll nonetheless. God knows she had those famous, buggy-beautiful eyes, silky skin and an ample chest, but Davis, like most women, lived with numerous imperfections. But she didn't harp on these flaws or engage in diva delusions, instead she gleefully, sometimes perversely played up her problem areas. And it sometimes made her all the more attractive. In All About Eve, she's supposed to be an insecure, aging star, yet even when a young Marilyn Monroe walks on (who looks like a peach, even after undoubtedly consuming numerous benzos and splits of champagne), you can't take your eyes off Bette. And it wasn't just her looks -- it was her way. Everything Bette did -- walking (in minced steps), talking (with exacting enunciation), smoking (in circular jabs) -- she did with a flourish. Like Joan Crawford, Marlene Dietrich, Greta Garbo and the great Tallulah Bankhead (who really should have made more movies) Bette was her own unforgettable invention, an unconventional glamour-puss, who stands the test of time. Unlike sanctioned beauty, Bette's particular magic is something that never fades

Please check out this piece in full here. Were Davis around to read it, I'm sure she'd approve, as Morgan knows what she's talking about and dishes up her affection for the late star in prose both witty and acidic. (Plus, I can't stop my gleeful imagination from picturing Davis playing Baby Jane and battling Chucky in some early 1980s New Line Cinema film that never was)

And it's not on DVD yet, but something of Davis worth tracking down on VHS is "Ex-Lady", a witty repartee-filled pre-code sex comedy (directed by Robert Florey) with Davis as a young urbanite commercial artist who prefers to shack up unmarried with her lover (Gene Raymond) rather than risk "ruining a good thing." It's one of those "still ahead of it's time" scintillators that make today's rom-coms seem like so much post-code neo-conservative propaganda in comparison. Not only that, but it's very funny (as in witty and acidic) and Davis is actually a bona fide sexy babe (see photo).

So happy birthday, Bette! Long may your films inspire women everywhere to stop reigning in their inner bitchery and to become their own "unforgettable inventions."

The Epic Actor - Charlton Heston (1923-2008)

To see Charlton Heston in person was to realize that some people are born to be movie stars. He had a larger-than-life presence on-screen. And off-screen as well. In 1980, at the Los Angeles International Film Exposition (the now-defunct FILMEX), I watched him introduce with his characteristic charisma and grace a three-day marathon of epic films. He was an appropriate choice to introduce the event since Heston, more than any other actor, defined the epic genre.

The golden era of the cinema epic lasted from approximately 1956 to 1966 (coinciding with the peak years of Cinemascope, VistaVision, and other wide-screen processes), and more often than not during that period, it was Heston who played the lead. The epics in which he appeared during those years were as follows:

The Ten Commandments (Cecil B. DeMille 1956) - Playing Moses, Heston convinces you he could part the Red Sea.

The Big Country (William Wyler 1958) - An epic Western. Heston plays a bad guy in this one, a ranch foreman who battles good guy Gregory Peck mano-a-mano in the film’s climactic fight sequence.

Ben-Hur (Wyler 1959) - Winning an Oscar as Judah Ben-Hur.

El Cid (Anthony Mann 1961, above) - Probably the finest film on this list. Heston is unforgettable as the Cid. Who else had the stature to play this legendary role?

55 Days at Peking (Nicholas Ray 1963) - Set during the turn of the century Boxer Rebellion. Want to see how good an actor Heston could be? Watch him here as American Major Matt Lewis trying to explain to a young Chinese girl that everyone she loved is dead.

Major Dundee (Sam Peckinpah 1965) - Another epic Western. Set during the Civil War. Heston plays the Ahab-like Major, obsessed with tracking down a band of murderous Apaches.

The Agony and the Ectasy (Carol Reed 1965) - Heston’s Moses was a dead ringer for Michelangelo’s statute of the patriarch, so why not play Michelangelo himself? Unfortunately the weakest film on this list.

The Greatest Story Ever Told (George Stevens 1965) - An unfairly maligned film. Visually stunning. Max Von Sydow appears as the best-acted screen Jesus ever. Heston is John the Baptist.

The War Lord (Franklin Schaffner 1965) - The fourth Heston epic to be released in 1965! A gritty, fascinating look at the feudal era. To quote Wikipedia, "Heston plays Chrysagon de la Cruex, an aging Norman knight charged with defending a Druidic village."

Khartoum (Basil Deardon 1966) - Heston plays the British General Charles "Chinese" Gordon opposite Laurence Olivier as the Mahdi.

After 1966, the cinema epic suffered a rapid decline. To compare 1964's The Fall of the Roman Empire (in which Heston did not appear) to its 2000 semi-remake Gladiator is to observe with deep regret how much the cinema epic has been dumbed down during the intervening decades, and how the vast sets and casts of tens of thousands that once occupied the Spanish plains (where many of these films were shot) have been replaced by cheaper and easier to control CGI. Regardless, even after the ‘60s, Heston continued to contribute to the epic genre, giving one of his best performances as the sinister Cardinal Richelieu in Richard Lester’s The Three Musketeers (1973) and The Four Musketeers (1974). Just as Heston’s Moses resembled Michelangelo’s sculpture, Heston’s Richelieu recalls a painting by El Greco.

The epic was not the only genre to which Heston made major contributions. He also appeared as policemen in two key film noirs – Orson Welles’ Touch of Evil (1958), and Richard Fleischer’s eco-conscious Soylent Green (1973), the first serious American feature to successfully blend film noir and futuristic sci-fi, anticipating Blade Runner and Harrison Ford’s performance therein by more than a decade.

Heston’s final screen appearances were both quite moving in their respective ways – as Tim Roth’s dying ape father in Tim Burton’s Planet of the Apes remake (2001 - Heston appeared in both versions), and as himself in Michael Moore’s Bowling for Columbine (2002), maintaining dignity even as he shuffled away from Moore’s prying camera, age having caught up with him at last.

[El Cid image courtesy of In the Company of Glenn. Thanks again, GK.]

Quote du Jour

"You kid yourself into thinking, 'I'm going to do one for them and one for me,' and then you realize they're all for them."

– Interview with Daniel "Heathers" Waters