More from the movie bin: Jamie Foxx and Eddie Murphy let Beyonce break up the band in the full trailer for Bill Condon’s Dreamgirls, and Stephen Soderbergh noirs up George Clooney, Cate Blanchett, and Tobey Maguire in a Mr. Movie Voice trailer for The Good German.
Category: Directors
Terror & Pan.
In the movie bin, Robert Rodriguez wallows in 70’s B-movie kitsch in the new trailer for Planet Terror, his half of Grindhouse, with Rose McGowan, Freddy Rodriguez, Michael Biehn and several others. And, more promisingly, Guillermo del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth gets another trailer, albeit one with Mr. Movie Voice.
Time Check.
“1985’s a problem for people. The Cold War’s a problem for people. But these are things I’ve been trying to [tell people] would be cool. I like that Richard Nixon is the president in it. I think that’s important. Those kinds of things tell you exactly what kind of movie this is – it’s not Fantastic Four, you know.” 300 director Zack Snyder offers a brief update on the current state of CWatchmen.
Terry le Heros.
As longtime readers might know (or might’ve adduced from some of the site banners above), I’ve always been a big Terry Gilliam fan, and will pony up for films considerably worse than The Brothers Grimm to repay the man for making Time Bandits, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and one my all-time favorite movies, Brazil. (In fact, “Ghost in the Machine” is the name of this site partly for the Brazil reference.) So it was a real treat yesterday when I and a friend from high school got to see Terry Gilliam live in the flesh last night at the IFC Center on 4th St. After making the rounds in front of The Daily Show yesterday afternoon, Gilliam showed up as part of IFC’s Movie Night series, in which a director of some repute screens one of his favorite films. (In fact, he showed up with the sign he’d been lugging around outside all day: “STUDIOLESS DIRECTOR — FAMILY TO SUPPORT — WILL DIRECT FOR FOOD”) Apparently, Gilliam had wanted to show One-Eyed Jacks, the 1961 western directed by Marlon Brando, but the Brando estate wouldn’t deliver a print or somesuch.
So, the film we got instead was Jaco von Dormael’s Toto le Heros (Toto the Hero), a bizarre Belgian concoction of 1991 that’s part Prince and the Pauper, part Singing Detective, part Citizen Kane and very Gilliamesque. A movie that’s hard-to-explain but that’s definitely worth renting, Toto follows the story of one Thomas van Haserbroeck (Don’t call him van Chickensoup), an imaginative young boy unsettlingly in love with his sister, a lonely man contemplating an affair with a mystery woman, and a deeply depressed senior citizen looking to exact revenge for a life-long grievance. Y’see, Thomas (or Toto, as he’s called in his dream life, where he’s a film noir gumshoe) insists he remembers being switched with another baby — his wealthy next-door neighbor, Albert Kant — during a fire at the hospital, and therein, in his mind, lies the source of most of his troubles. As the story switches back and forth in time, Toto and Albert’s lives keep butting against each other in strange doppelganger fashion, while old-Thomas enacts a plan to reclaim his stolen life…
After the movie, Gilliam returned to the front for a wide-ranging Q&A session, which involved questions both probing (“Did you borrow from Toto in 12 Monkeys?” [No, don’t think so.]) and peculiar (“Where’d you buy your shoes? Where’s the worst place you ever spent the night?” [Birkenstocks, some backwater hut in India]) Along the way, Gilliam told tales of first meeting the Python guys, photographing Frank Zappa in 1967, choosing his various directors of photography, and, the battle of Brazil notwithstanding, generally enjoying the constraints of studio heads and limited budgets. (They focus him.) Speaking of which, he also said Good Omens still seems to be moving forward, and Quixote may still happen someday. (He also mentioned The Defective Detective briefly, but it seemed in the past tense.) And these days he’s digging the new Dylan album, as well The Arcade Fire’s Funeral and The Flaming Lips’ At War with the Mystics.
At one point, he also said he was considering suing Bush, Cheney, et al for making an unauthorized remake of Brazil. With that in mind, I asked him whether his views on Brazil had changed at all now that we’re kinda living it. (I mean, what with Cheney playing Mr. Helpmann, Canadian citizens getting Buttled, and the Dubya team now fully sanctioning Jack Lints, what’s a good Sam Lowry to do, other than await his turn in the chair or on the waterboard?) He noted that, obviously, Brazil-type stuff was going on around the world at the time (in the Soviet bloc, Argentina, etc.) but that he watched the film the other day (to check out the new Criterion HD-DVD version) and was amazed at both how prescient and topical it was.
Throughout, Gilliam was amazingly friendly and personable, and came across a remarkably humble and down-to-earth guy. He kept taking questions well after the IFC-suit tried to close down the affair, and hung around the nearby cafe afterwards to sign various items. I ended up being the second guy in line, and got him to sign the Brazil still above (one of five I have framed in my hallway.) When he asked me my name for the signature, he lit up, “Kevin! Time Bandits Kevin!” I told him I was right around that age when I first saw Time Bandits, and he’s definitely got a lot to answer for.
Very Bad Men.
Some big-time action franchises verge closer to their villains: Syriana‘s Jeffrey Wright may face up against a DC-based John McClane in Live Free or Die Hard (a.k.a. Die Hard 4), while United 93/Bourne 2 director Paul Greengrass looks to enlist The Science of Sleep‘s Gael Garcia Bernal as the Big Bad of The Bourne Ultimatum, a film which also recently procured David Strathairn.
A Dent in Nolan’s Plan.
In an interview with IGN Filmforce, Christopher Nolan discusses The Dark Knight and The Prisoner, and confirms that Harvey Dent will have a role in the former, although he hasn’t yet been cast. Guy Pearce? Liev Schrieber?
But it’s of Her I Dream.
Since he’s been on a roll with the exquisite, heartfelt Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (which I thought was far and away the best film of 2004) and the sunny afternoon jaunt Dave Chappelle’s Block Party, which came out earlier this year (I thought less of 2001’s Human Nature), I’ve been very much looking forward to Michel Gondry’s The Science of Sleep. (In fact, I’d say it, The Prestige, The Fountain, Pan’s Labyrinth, and Children of Men were/are probably my most anticipated movies for the remainder of 2006.) Unfortunately, Sleep, which I caught yesterday morning as the first half of a double-feature, was a film I ended up admiring more than truly enjoying. At its best moments, it (like the much better Eternal Sunshine) is a hallucinatory rumination on love, memory, and obsession that’s at turns whimsical and melancholic. But, like scraps of dream exposed to the morning light, these moments are evanescent and fleeting and, without the narrative thrust of Sunshine driving this movie, Science can feel episodic, hit-or-miss, and at times uncomfortably close to twee.
Like Walter Mitty or Sam Lowry, the shy, imaginative Stephane (Gael Garcia Bernal) lives mostly in his dreams, where he’s the host, star, and in-house band for the psychedelic sitcom/talkshow/mindmeld Stephane TV. In the Paris of the real world, unfortunately, Stephane’s innate inventiveness is rotting away: He wiles the hours at a painfully mundane typesetting job he got through his mother (Miou-Miou), while fending off the bizarre quirks of his coworkers, most notably the middle-aged prankster Guy (Alain Chabat). But, Stephane’s life takes a momentous turn when a piano falls on him during his morning commute, and he meets his striking new neighbor, Stephanie (Charlotte Gainsbourg, daughter of Serge and actress Jane Birkin). After some confusion over whether Stephane prefers Stephanie or her cute friend Zoe (Emma de Caunes), Stephane determines it’s the former in spades, and sets out to win her heart, mainly by appealing to their shared creativity. But, is Stephane’s fanciful dreaming a boon or a burden when it comes to wooing Stephanie? As his real and dream lives begin to fold, splinter, overlap, and convolute, it becomes increasingly harder to tell where he stands with her, or, in fact, where he stands at all.
An occasionally captivating, occasionally baffling exercise in the key of dream-minor, The Science of Sleep gets points for thinking outside the box — note the one-second time machine — and for its unique DIY visual marvels: Plush animals come to life, water taps spew forth cellophane, cardboard cars ride to and fro. (Think of Gondry’s Bjork videos.) And I thought its primary conceit — that the significant other in your head, molded from impressions and fragmentary evidence, desires and wishful thinking, resentments and regrets, is so much more often the one you’re grappling with rather than the actual person — is a shrewd and able one, even if that case was also central to Eternal Sunshine. Finally, the film takes several strange and unexpected turns in its final act, which I appreciated for their attempt to complicate the story here. By the end, both Stephanie and particularly Stephane seem significantly less sympathetic characters, but, even amid all the bizarre dreaming, also in many ways more realistic ones.
Still, for all the creativity on display, The Science of Sleep feels slack at times, particularly as the lower-caste demons of Stephane’s office perennially return to haunt him. For better or worse, it is dream logic rather than narrative logic which dictates what’s going on throughout Gondry’s film, which can lead to more than a little meandering throughout. In sum, I found The Science of Sleep an intriguing cinematic exercise and even at times a haunting “love” story, but it had definite pacing problems. I definitely recommend seeing it — it’s miles above your traditional rom-com — but it’s less one for the ages (a la Eternal Sunshine) than it is one feverish, uneasy night amid the Dreaming.
Tolkien or Termeraire?
As MGM announces it’s planning The Hobbit as a tentpole release (with New Line, and hopefully with Peter Jackson at the helm), PJ contemplates optioning the Termeraire books by Naomi Novik. Get back to Bag End, Pete!
No Joking Matter.
“It’s definitely going to stump people. I think it’ll be more along the lines of how the Joker was meant to be in the comics, darker and more sinister.” Brokeback Mountain‘s Heath Ledger says all the right things about his upcoming turn as the Joker in Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight. “I wouldn’t have thought of me, either. But it’s obviously not going to be what Jack Nicholson did. It’s going to be more nuanced and dark and more along the lines of a Clockwork Orange kind of feel. Which is, I think, what the comic book was after: less about his laugh and more about his eyes.” And, in related news, Bob Hoskins hasn’t heard he might be playing the Penguin, so scratch that one off the rumor list for now.
A Long-Expected Party?
Is something stirring in Middle Earth? While Peter Jackson announces he’s producing a remake of The Dam Busters (to be directed by Christian Rivers, WETA’s head animatic guy from LotR and Kong), very vague rumors emerge from the head office at New Line of a July 2007 start date for filming of The Hobbit. Let’s hope they at least give PJ the right of first refusal…Giving this property to somebody like Ratner would be absolutely criminal. Update: Another intriguing LotR link (albeit from the Mises Institute), via Dangerous Meta: Tolkien v. Power.