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Grace of Monaco, Missing Reels, etc.

So Grace of Monaco is apparently a big loser. In The Guardian, Peter Bradshaw’s takedown says it’s “so awe-inspiringly wooden that it is basically a fire risk.” Other reviews are more kind; in Variety, Scott Foundas calls it a “cornball melodrama,” and for Vanity Fair, Jordan Hoffman allows that it’s “entertaining and watchable,” if ridiculous, which sounds like a grudging endorsement to me even though the subhead calls it “bad.” A writer for The Playlist, Jessica Kiang, describes a screening punctuated by guffaws from the assembled critics. In Time, Richard Corliss at least defends Nicole Kidman’s titular performance (if only David Thomson were at Cannes this year!), but the bottom line is there are seven reviews at RottenTomatoes.com at this writing, and none of them are “fresh.”

James Gray on his influences. Man, director James Gray is a terrific interview. Intelligent, respectful, and fairly candid. On the occasion of the release of his The Immigrant, Steve Erickson talked him up about all the different films he swipes ideas from, from Rocco and His Brothers to A Short Film About Love. Stephanie Zacharek reviews The Immigrant, which is getting a very limited release: “In today’s movie-marketing climate, The Immigrant probably has too much feeling for its own good. But anyone who cares about movies, and about what movies can be, should try to see it on the big screen.”

Classic film specialist Farran Smith Nehme, aka The Siren, is publishing her first novel. Do you work at a bookstore or are you somehow otherwise engaged in bookselling? If you can figure out a way into Book Expo America, the annual industry trade show that takes place at Manhattan’s unlovable Javits Center, why not show up on Thursday morning and pick up a signed galley of Missing Reels? It’s by New York Post film critic Farran Smith Nehme, perhaps better known online as blogger Self-Styled Siren, and it’s coming from a real publisher, film-friendly The Overlook Press. It’s set against the backdrop of the New York repertory movie-theater scene in the late 1980s; the synopsis reminds me a little of the Theodore Roszak classic cult-film yarn Flicker, but maybe with a happier ending! She says she’ll be signing books around 11:30 a.m. at the Overlook booth; in my experience you may or may not be able to get your hands on a galley if you miss the event.

Billy Wilder, Shirley MacLaine, Jack Lemmon.

Billy Wilder, Shirley MacLaine, and Jack Lemmon.
From Irma la Douce (Wilder, 1963).

[via chained and perfumed]

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James Gray and We Own the Night

Shortly after I saw We Own the Night back in August, I spent about an hour talking with writer/director James Gray at a midtown hotel about his movie for a Q&A over at Film & Video. Could not have been a nicer guy, and I think my estimation of his movie grew a notch or two over the course of the interview. (This is one of the reasons why it’s troublesome, I think, for movie critics to do interviews or have any kind of relationship with the filmmakers they cover — for many of us I think it may be just that tiny bit harder to say something unkind about a movie by someone who’s gone out of his way to be friendly to you.)

We were set to talk mainly about the film’s big car chase scene, which was shot in sunlight but had computer-generated rain added after the fact. But one of the things that interested me was he seemed to come out swinging right away over the idea that his movie had a predictable story — or at least over the notion that “predictability” by itself is a deficit. I trimmed a big chunk of the published interview, partly for reasons of word-count and partly because it wasn’t on-topic for F&V, but also because it contains SPOILERS related to the very last scene of the movie.

Here’s a pretty lengthy excerpt (with SPOILERS) from the cutting-room floor, as it were — and, by all means, please click over to F&V to read the more technical stuff if you find that kind of thing interesting.

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