(August 17,
2003)
LO-FI
This week was chaotic, to say the least. First, my cable modem entered into its
second week of inactivity. I even had the modem replaced. Nothing worked. I was
stuck using dial-up and everything took 4 times as long to do.
Then I had two press days to attend: American Splendor and Casa de los
Babys. I’m still borrowing cameras for my photography and here I used my
friend Ippei’s old Sony mini-DV. Unfortunately, he couldn’t find his AC
adaptor, so I was stuck with a battery that had a total of about 20 minutes left
on it.
I have a lousy habit of not eating well on press days. That mixed with an
incredibly fast metabolism can cause disasters. And it did this week. I missed
the press lunch I had counted on for Splendor and went without eating. I
munched pretzel rods for the rest of the day. By Tuesday, when I did Babys,
I was all cramped up in physical agony. Fun! Fun! Fun!
I went into Babys knowing the battery was nearing its end. I
intentionally kept my photography to a minimum. The final person I had to
photograph was Marcia Gay Harden. She stood by the wall in the conference room
at The Regency, while I clicked the camera on. The image started wide, then I
quickly zoomed in. As I got her into close-up the camera died.
In order to digitize the filmed footage into my PowerBook I scammed Circuit
City. I told the guy there that I’d been filming outside and my battery died.
He was reluctant to let me plug into one of their display AC cables, so I told
him I couldn’t even eject the tape – which was true. He let me charge the
camera for 10 minutes.
Upon digitizing the footage, which I was scared wouldn’t come out well under
such circumstances, I was relieved. I had been convinced that Marcia’s footage
was screwed, but in my opinion – and I thought John Sayles, Lili Taylor, and
Maggie Gyllenhaal (who unintentionally struck a stunning Garbo pose) looked
fabulous – she came out the best. And it was because of the rush. She’s
known for playing such tough characters that it’s disarming to see her tiny in
the wide shot, then looking just off camera in the medium close-up. The latter
contains only one element in focus: her face. Everything else blurred because of
the inward zoom. The quickness exposed a vulnerability to her that I’ve never
seen before on film.
Next up, we had the blackout. I live in Brooklyn, but was stuck in Manhattan. I
never made it home Thursday. I crashed at a friend’s place. Friday I trekked
over the 59th St. Bridge into Queens and down to Brooklyn in full exposure of
the sun. Took just under 2 hours.
I got home and loaded up on Excedrin. I was lying down when my roommate’s
radio suddenly started blasting. Power had been restored. Shortly after we tried
the internet just to see if it was working. It was.
I survived. But I’m still waiting for that piano to fall on my head.
BAD IDEAS
I’m going to throw another piece of kindling into The Passion’s fire.
I think Jews should get angry that a white boy is playing one of them in a movie
– and even having his eyes altered with CGI!
There’s no way Jesus looked like Jim Caviezel anymore than he looked like Max
Von Sydow or Willem Dafoe. A Semitic man from that period would most likely
resemble a short Jew of modern times.
I hereby nominate Ben Stiller to play Jesus. I suggest the Anti-Defamation
League take action right away on Mr. Stiller’s behalf. Until this oversight of
blatant racism is corrected we must…I don’t know…send lots of letters to
Icon Productions.
Mel Gibson needs to accept that Jesus looked the same as, and was of the same
tribe as those damn Jews who had him murdered. If his intent is realism, then he
needs to get real. Enough of this minstrel shit.
Another bad idea is Miramax’s re-release of George Clooney’s Confessions
of a Dangerous Mind. It didn’t work the first time. Won’t fare much
better the second. If Mr. Clooney is interested in building interest in the
film, then he needs to send it as quickly as possibly to video and DVD. That’s
where theatrical misfires find their audiences nowadays. I thought he was smart
enough to have figured that out.
The worst part of all is that the movie wasn’t that good. Clooney’s
directorial style, which can also be blamed on cinematographer Newton Thomas
Sigel and editor Stephen Mirrione, is completely out of synch with Charlie
Kaufman’s overrated script. (I think a lot of critics praised the film as a
circle jerk to Kaufman who also penned last year’s overrated Adaptation.)
Kaufman’s script was comic in nature. It had a specific timing and most
successful comedies do. Unfortunately, Clooney ignored that pace and shot the
film like a music video. After Shaun saw it he told me it looked like Clooney
had basically thrown in every cool shot he could think of.
What Clooney didn’t get was that this film, which is purportedly based on
actual events surrounding the life of TV producer Chuck Barris, needed to be
portrayed realistically. That was the point of it: absurdity disguised as
reality. Spike Jonze, who’s shot 2 of Kaufman scripts, already understood
this. His films look almost anonymous in their aesthetics. Kubrick got it too
– he interpreted Franz Kafka’s genius as writing surreal, paranoid episodes
in the detached, clinical manner of a court reporter.
The re-release will flop, then Confessions will go to video where
film-geeks will find it and make it a cult hit.
MEGALOPOLIS
Yes, I’m eagerly awaiting Francis Ford Coppola’s much-hyped Megalopolis.
Coppola was the greatest non-expatriate American filmmaker of the 1970s. He was
responsible for, in vary degrees, Patton, The Godfather, Parts I
& II, The Conversation, American Graffiti, and Apocalypse
Now. I consider the latter film to be the second most astonishing motion
picture I’ve ever seen – right after 2001: A Space Odyssey, by the
greatest expatriate American director Stanley Kubrick.
Mr. Coppola has not made a great film in a quarter century. Rumble Fish
was interesting and Bram Stoker’s Dracula had wonderful production
elements. But after the laborious process of completing Apocalypse and
the critical and commercial catastrophe of One From the Heart, he
hasn’t had the clout or confidence to really let himself go creatively.
He’s spent the last decade or so focusing on commercial-type films like Dracula,
Jack, and The Rainmaker. He’s also built up his business
interests in wine and restaurants. He’s also produced films for his son Roman
(CQ) and his daughter Sofia (The Virgin Suicides, and the
wonderful Lost in Translation), raising questions of nepotism.
All of this has been intentional. Two things he’s realized are that he’ll
have to finance any large-scale movies on his own, and that like Stanley Kubrick
and Terrence Malick it’s sometimes good for your reputation to take some time
off.
I can’t recall the first time I heard about Megalopolis. It was at
least 5 years ago, probably. It was certainly before he turned 60 (he’s 64
this year), because I remember him talking about wanting to make this great epic
on the scale of Fellini’s La Dolce Vita before he turned 60.
For the last couple of years well-placed articles have cropped up from time to
time. Most recently I read that he’s traveling the globe to study urban
planning in great cities, since the film chronicles reconstruction in New York
City. It apparently pits a futurist architect against a conservative
bureaucracy, which fits perfectly into Coppola’s recurring themes over the
years.
I recently rented Tucker: The Man and His Dream. It wasn’t a
particularly great film, though it was certainly one of his most personal. It
chronicles Preston Tucker, who in the 1940s tried to innovate automobiles, but
ran right into the Big Three. It stars Jeff Bridges as Tucker, and features
typically lush photography by Vittorio Storraro, which, although shot in a scope
aspect ratio of 2.35:1, was inexplicably chopped like Apocalypse to
1.85:1 for DVD.
(Interestingly, documentary footage on the DVD is credited to John Schwartzman,
Coppola’s nephew, son of Talia Shire and brother of Jason Schwartzman, a
definite disciple of Storraro, who’s somehow been mentioned in my last 3
editorials.)
Tucker looked like it was originally a larger film, but needing a
commercial success in 1988 Coppola, along with producer George Lucas, opted to
focus the final cut on the main action. It was the wrong decision, as many
things like character development got lopped off. Tucker was a perfect
example of his filmmaking since 1983 – ambitious, but insecure.
If Coppola can pull off Megalopolis – and I mean create a masterpiece
– he will conceivably obliterate the last 2 decades. I will have no problem
declaring him the greatest living American filmmaker.
If he fails his career will be over. He’ll be considered a giant of the 1970s
who lost his way. But with pictures like The Godfather, The
Conversation, and Apocalypse Now to his credit, perhaps that will be
enough. It’s certainly better than most people could do over an entire career,
let
alone a single decade.
CLICK HERE for last week's RAMBLE.
-Copyright
2003 by Jamie
Stuart