Film Archive for September, 2010

Dear Chris Noth: Critics Killed SATC? Seriously?

Apparently Chris Noth, aka Mr. Big of the Sex and the City franchise, thinks the power of the film critic pen is strong enough kill off any future SATC movies. New York Magazine caught up with Noth at the premiere for Jack Goes Boating, where he had these words of wisdom to share about SATC’s future sequel prospects:
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True Grit Teaser. Yum.

I just finished watching the teaser trailer for True Grit for the third fourth fifth time, and I am hooked.

The shots in the trailer certainly have that Coen stamp all over them, but the thing I found most interesting was the choice to laud the Oscar wins of Jeff Bridges and Matt Damon and the Oscar nom of Josh Brolin as much as the film itself.

Even the mention of directors Ethan Coen and Joel Coen is appended by “Academy Award winning directors of No Country for Old Men.”

That’s a lot of Oscar mention in a one-minute clip. If you didn’t think the Coens and Paramount were gunning for the Oscar race before now, you can’t help but have “True Grit” and “Oscars” married in your mind after watching it.

The allusion to No Country for Old Men interested me as much as the Oscar-pimping, though … referencing that particular Coens’ film tells you a lot about what to expect tonally of their take on True Grit. I don’t know about you, but I can’t wait to see it.

Oh, and that song? Sublime. More, please.

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Review: Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps

Up until the last ten minutes or so, I was really digging Wall Street 2: Money Never Sleeps. It’s not that we needed to revisit Gordon “Greed is Good” Gekko (Michael Douglas), that classically evil rich white bad guy who preceded (some might say, foretold) all those rich (mostly) white (mostly) bad guys who built the dicey house of financial cards that very nearly collapsed the world economy when the bubble burst in 2008. But I didn’t mind seeing how director Oliver Stone thought Gekko would have evolved after spending those years behind bars.
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Review: You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger

Woody Allen‘s latest effort, You Will Find a Tall Dark Stranger, finds the director returning to Europe — the fertile ground which, in recent years, has served as the setting for the excellent Match Point and Vicky Cristina Barcelona and the fair-to-middling Cassandra’s Dream and Scoop. This time around he’s back in London with a story about the futile, perpetual human desire to chase after that ever elusive greener grass.
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Arthouse Redux: Themes of Forgiveness

This past Sunday, the sermon at our Unitarian church was about the Jewish High Holy Days Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, the bookends of the “Days of Awe” on the Jewish calendar. Yom Kippur is, of course, about atonement and repentance, and all the talk in the sermon about Yom Kippur got me thinking about two very different films in which forgiveness is a theme.
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And Now, a Brief Break for Something Only Vaguely TIFF-related

Okay, this is interesting (at least to me).

I’ve been tracking this Bradley Rust Gray lesbian-werewolf project, Jack and Diane, since way back in 2008, when Ellen Page was attached to the project with Juno co-star Olivia Thirlby, then suddenly not attached post-Juno’s success.

So as I was poking around on IMDb to learn a bit about the star of Dirty Girl — who is, interestingly enough, named Juno Temple — I stumbled across the intriguing bit of info that Temple is now listed on Jack and Diane’s IMDb site as playing the part of Diane in the project, with Riley Keough, who played twin sister to Dakota Fanning’s Cherie Currie in The Runaways, now listed as playing Jack. Huh.

Bear in mind that my only source for this is IMDb, so this isn’t exactly earth-shattering investigative journalism. Just a random bit of info on a project I’ve been following interest for a long time now. Now, if only the film actually gets made, and is actually good, we’ll be getting somewhere.

We now return you to your regularly scheduled TIFF coverage …

TIFF Review: Made in Dagenham

The film with the strongest “female empowerment” vibe at TIFF may just be Made in Dagenham, a film about the feminist movement taking over an unlikely corner of working class England in 1968, when female factory workers who sewed seat covers for the Ford Motors plant went on strike.

For once, we have a film about women where they do something interesting and important, and talk about things other than the men in their lives or fashion. Hallelujah. It’s kind of the anti-Sex and the City — a Norma Rae tale of the British working class with a vibe tonally similar to Calendar Girls (also directed by Cole) or The Full Monty (not directed by Cole), so if you liked either or both of those films, you’ll almost certainly like this one.

Made in Dagenham stars Sally Hawkins, whose presence in a film is always a good thing; Toss Bob Hoskins in the mix, and you up the odds considerably of the film being a winner.

Hawkins plays Rita O’Grady, a wife, mother and factory worker at the Dagenham factory where she works alongside 186 other women sewing custom-made seat covers for Ford cars. The women are downgraded to “unskilled labor” and end up striking not just to be reinstated to “semi-skilled” but for equal pay, at a time when the tide of feminism was rising and threatening to sweep the corporate world by storm. This film is really about much more than this particular strike at this particular point in history, though; it’s about what’s fair, what’s “right” versus what’s a “privilege,” and the need to stand up for what you believe in, even in the face of adversity.

The film dramatizes how the men — both in management and the women’s own husbands — are at first patronizingly tolerant of “the girls” going on strike, but when push comes to shove and their own jobs at the factory are jeopardized by the shutdown, it’s another story. Although the women supported their men when they went on strike, the shoe being on the other foot doesn’t fit quite as well with the male perspective on women’s place in society.

And to an extent, that’s every bit as relevant today as it was in 1968, the year in which I was born. I work, and travel for my job, and I’ve experienced a lot in my own career having people dare to question my commitment to my family and whether my work conflicts with that — something I daresay my male colleagues have largely never had to deal with. Things have changed a lot on the one hand with regard to women in the workplace and pay (although we still have yet to achieve that whole “equal pay” thing across the board), but on the other hand societal attitudes towards working women haven’t changed all that much over 40 years later. We’ve still got a long ways to go, baby … but it’s thanks to women like Rita O’Grady that we’ve come as far as we have.

I could see Made in Dagenham playing very well to the female audience in America with the right marketing and enough critical support behind it; it’s a relevant film about an important topic, and moreover it’s enormously entertaining. In addition to Hawkins and Hoskins, by the bye, Miranda Richardson is on-hand as British Labour Party firebrand Barbara Castle, and she does a hell of a job bringing that great lady to life.

Overall, Made in Dagenham is solid, entertaining, even inspiring. I’d love to see this film get a little momentum behind it, because Hawkins is every bit as good in this film as she was in Happy-Go-Lucky.

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It shows how out of it I was in trying to be in it, acknowledging that I was out of it to myself, and then thinking, “Okay, how do I stop being out of it? Well, I get some legitimate illogical narrative ideas” — some novel, you know?

So I decided on three writers that I might be able to option their material and get some producer, or myself as producer, and then get some writer to do a screenplay on it, and maybe make a movie.

And so the three projects were “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep,” “Naked Lunch” and a collection of Bukowski. Which, in 1975, forget it — I mean, that was nuts. Hollywood would not touch any of that, but I was looking for something commercial, and I thought that all of these things were coming.

There would be no Blade Runner if there was no Ray Bradbury. I couldn’t find Philip K. Dick. His agent didn’t even know where he was. And so I gave up.

I was walking down the street and I ran into Bradbury — he directed a play that I was going to do as an actor, so we know each other, but he yelled “hi” — and I’d forgot who he was.

So at my girlfriend Barbara Hershey’s urging — I was with her at that moment — she said, “Talk to him! That guy really wants to talk to you,” and I said “No, fuck him,” and keep walking.

But then I did, and then I realized who it was, and I thought, “Wait, he’s in that realm, maybe he knows Philip K. Dick.” I said, “You know a guy named—” “Yeah, sure — you want his phone number?”

My friend paid my rent for a year while I wrote, because it turned out we couldn’t get a writer. My friends kept on me about, well, if you can’t get a writer, then you write.”
~ Hampton Fancher

“That was the most disappointing thing to me in how this thing was played. Is that I’m on the phone with you now, after all that’s been said, and the fundamental distinction between what James is dealing with in these other cases is not actually brought to the fore. The fundamental difference is that James Franco didn’t seek to use his position to have sex with anyone. There’s not a case of that. He wasn’t using his position or status to try to solicit a sexual favor from anyone. If he had — if that were what the accusation involved — the show would not have gone on. We would have folded up shop and we would have not completed the show. Because then it would have been the same as Harvey Weinstein, or Les Moonves, or any of these cases that are fundamental to this new paradigm. Did you not notice that? Why did you not notice that? Is that not something notable to say, journalistically? Because nobody could find the voice to say it. I’m not just being rhetorical. Why is it that you and the other critics, none of you could find the voice to say, “You know, it’s not this, it’s that”? Because — let me go on and speak further to this. If you go back to the L.A. Times piece, that’s what it lacked. That’s what they were not able to deliver. The one example in the five that involved an issue of a sexual act was between James and a woman he was dating, who he was not working with. There was no professional dynamic in any capacity.

~ David Simon