Julian Schnabel hit the suburbs tonight, taking the stage at the Burns Film Center in Pleasantville, NY, along with erstwhile New York Times film critic Janet Maslin after a screening of The Diving Bell and the Butterfly for a pleasantly rambling Q&A. Among the topics covered was the real genesis of the project, which apparently has its roots in Schnabel's thwarted attempt to film Perfume. Schnabel described the connection in some detail, but it boils down in part to the similarities he saw between Jean-Baptiste Grenouille's ability to smell his way across continents and the paralyzed Jean-Dominique Bauby's gift for traveling in his own imagination. (As an aside, both Schnabel and Maslin took the opportunity to trash the eventual adaptation of Perfume last year, by Tom Tykwer -- which I didn' t think was so bad, especially for a notoriously unfilmable novel, but whatever.)
November 2007 Archives
Julian Schnabel hit the suburbs tonight, taking the stage at the Burns Film Center in Pleasantville, NY, along with erstwhile New York Times film critic Janet Maslin after a screening of The Diving Bell and the Butterfly for a pleasantly rambling Q&A. Among the topics covered was the real genesis of the project, which apparently has its roots in Schnabel's thwarted attempt to film Perfume. Schnabel described the connection in some detail, but it boils down in part to the similarities he saw between Jean-Baptiste Grenouille's ability to smell his way across continents and the paralyzed Jean-Dominique Bauby's gift for traveling in his own imagination. (As an aside, both Schnabel and Maslin took the opportunity to trash the eventual adaptation of Perfume last year, by Tom Tykwer -- which I didn' t think was so bad, especially for a notoriously unfilmable novel, but whatever.)
Waitress (Fox)
Waitress takes on an unavoidable added poignancy when you know the story
behind it. (Actress Adrienne Shelly, a staple of the
Ghosts of Cite Soleil (Thinkfilm)
This raw and sobering look at gang life in the Haitian slums seems to be consciously aimed at short attention spans, cranking itself continually forward so fast that you wonder what's been left out. But it's one of those amazing pieces of documentary that makes you wonder how in the world the filmmakers got so close to the action. I reviewed it in June.
Order it from Amazon.com: Ghosts of Cite Soleil
Hairspray (New Line)
Nobody could have expected this to be as crappy as I did, but, lo and behold, it's a terrifically entertaining high-school musical. John Travolta and Michelle Pfeiffer can go screw themselves as far as I'm concerned, and the songs aren't great, but the kids — especially Nikki Blonsky in what should be billed as the lead plus Amanda Bynes and James Marsden in good-natured comic supporting roles — are all right.
Buy it from Amazon.com: Hairspray (Widescreen Edition) or Hairspray (Two-Disc Shake & Shimmy Edition) or Hairspray [Blu-ray]
Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse (Paramount/ American Zoetrope)
Long unavailable (my VHS copy was recorded off Showtime on its 1991 premiere), this new DVD was such a stealth production that even director George Hickenlooper — who had long been lobbying to help create a special-edition release — had no idea it was coming out until he read about it on the Internet. Reportedly uncut despite long-standing rumors of Coppola's discomfort with his own near-lunatic presence in the film, Hearts of Darkness is based largely on about 60 hours of footage shot by Coppola's wife, Eleanor, during the near-disastrous (well, some would say it really was a disaster) making of Apocalypse Now. It's all here — the budget overruns, the bad weather, the abortive French Plantation sequence, Martin Sheen's heart attack, Brando's arrival on the scene, overweight and underprepared. "We were in the jungle, " Coppola says at one point, "there were too many of us, we had access to too much money, too much equipment, and little by little we went insane." They don't make 'em like that any more.
Buy it from Amazon.com: Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse
Manufactured Landscapes (Zeitgeist)
It's a shame that the high-definition home-viewing revolution hasn't, to date, revolutionized titles like Manufactured Landscapes, because Jennifer Baichwal's film about Edward Burtynsky's ongoing photography project — he documents the effects of industry on natural landscapes, to often-stunning effect — is as visually provocative in its way as Burtynsky's own work. Credit must go in part to artful cinematography by Peter Mettler, but Baichwal keeps the film reined in, avoiding facts-and-figures outrage and instead allowing the humbling scope of the desolate imagery depicted to speak largely for itself. Reviewing it in June, I wrote, "The images are striking in their otherworldliness, suggesting science-fiction landscapes as readily as dystopian ruins of the here and now. They're relics of human pride and folly — signposts, perhaps, on a one-way street."
Buy it from Amazon.com: Manufactured Landscapes (US Edition)
Timely art about the Iraq War seems so crucial to a sense of
cultural equilibrium, and Redacted is at some levels such an impressive reboot
of Brian De Palma's career, that part of me wants to figure out reasons to
shower it with praise. Unfortunately, while Redacted, a verité-style drama
about a group of American soldiers manning a checkpoint in
Believe the hype. Charles Burnett's long-unreleased slice of Americana is every bit the lost classic its partisans have declared it for the last 30 years. There's nothing flashy or innovative about its style, nothing innovative or groundbreaking about its technique. As David Denby suggested in The New Yorker earlier this year, it's kind of like a great blues record — scruffy and familiar in some ways, startlingly expressive and singularly mournful in others, Or, as I put it back in March, "I've seen quite a few films about growing up in America, but there's a nonchalant immediacy to this one that I've never seen matched."
Buy it from Amazon.com: Killer of Sheep: The Charles Burnett Collection
Ladies and gentlemen, Sidney Lumet has entered the building, and he wants you to know he's still a badass.
Ratatouille (Disney)
Sometimes I feel like all this writing about movies — coming up with reasons to dismiss movies I dislike, articulating elements I think could have been handled better and enumerating the problems in script, casting and execution — has turned me into a curmudgeonly freak who's incapable of enjoying a great Hollywood entertainment on its own terms. And then I see something like Ratatouille, which plasters a dumb smile on my face for the majority of two hours and runs over and over in my head for weeks and months. Look, critics don't really enjoy sitting through dross, even if it means they get to exercise their fickle fingers for a few minutes by typing a clever slag on the new popular blockbuster or critics' (the wrong critics) darling and slapping a C-, or a D, or even an F at the bottom of the review. Those reviews can be fun to read. But they'd destroy the soul if there weren't reviews of movies like Ratatouille to go along with them. A-freaking-plus, man.
Buy it from Amazon.com: Ratatouille or Ratatouille [Blu-ray]
Sicko (Weinstein Co.)
Of all Michael Moore’s qualities, the most underrated may be his skill as a storyteller. For better and worse, his strategy has always involved forcing his political arguments to fit a strong narrative structure. In those terms, Sicko, his documentary about the American health-care system, is a doozy. This film’s stories are heartbreaking; many of its characters are already dead — victims, Moore argues, of for-profit HMOs that seek to deny as many insurance claims as possible. He gathers anecdotal evidence about universal, government-paid health care in Canada, France, the U.K., and even Cuba — where he’s able to secure no-questions-asked care for a group of ailing 9/11 rescue workers. Moore once again skirts anything resembling real debate, failing to engage with dissenting views on more than a superficial level, but his questions are effectively pointed. If universal health care is the boondoggle its opponents claim, why is Moore able to find so many happy testimonials from non-U.S. citizens? And what are the moral implications of a system that refuses care to people who are desperately in need? Impressively, Moore maintains a sense of humor, keeping Sicko from becoming pointlessly shrill or completely maudlin — instead, it’s absorbing, occasionally infuriating, and thoroughly entertaining.