A highly perceptive account of how this feels.

Topic of Cancer Culture: vanityfair.com


I have more than once in my time woken up feeling like death. But nothing prepared me for the early morning last June when I came to consciousness feeling as if I were actually shackled to my own corpse. The whole cave of my chest and thorax seemed to have been hollowed out and then refilled with slow-drying cement. I could faintly hear myself breathe but could not manage to inflate my lungs. My heart was beating either much too much or much too little. Any movement, however slight, required forethought and planning. It took strenuous effort for me to cross the room of my New York hotel and summon the emergency services. They arrived with great dispatch and behaved with immense courtesy and professionalism. I had the time to wonder why they needed so many boots and helmets and so much heavy backup equipment, but now that I view the scene in retrospect I see it as a very gentle and firm deportation, taking me from the country of the well across the stark frontier that marks off the land of malady. Within a few hours, having had to do quite a lot of emergency work on my heart and my lungs, the physicians at this sad border post had shown me a few other postcards from the interior and told me that my immediate next stop would have to be with an oncologist. Some kind of shadow was throwing itself across the negatives.

The previous evening, I had been launching my latest book at a successful event in New Haven. The night of the terrible morning, I was supposed to go on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and then appear at a sold-out event at the 92nd Street Y, on the Upper East Side, in conversation with Salman Rushdie. My very short-lived campaign of denial took this form: I would not cancel these appearances or let down my friends or miss the chance of selling a stack of books. I managed to pull off both gigs without anyone noticing anything amiss, though I did vomit two times, with an extraordinary combination of accuracy, neatness, violence, and profusion, just before each show. This is what citizens of the sick country do while they are still hopelessly clinging to their old domicile.

The new land is quite welcoming in its way. Everybody smiles encouragingly and there appears to be absolutely no racism. A generally egalitarian spirit prevails, and those who run the place have obviously got where they are on merit and hard work. As against that, the humor is a touch feeble and repetitive, there seems to be almost no talk of sex, and the cuisine is the worst of any destination I have ever visited. The country has a language of its own—a lingua franca that manages to be both dull and difficult and that contains names like ondansetron, for anti-nausea medication—as well as some unsettling gestures that require a bit of getting used to. For example, an official met for the first time may abruptly sink his fingers into your neck. That’s how I discovered that my cancer had spread to my lymph nodes, and that one of these deformed beauties—located on my right clavicle, or collarbone—was big enough to be seen and felt. It’s not at all good when your cancer is “palpable” from the outside. Especially when, as at this stage, they didn’t even know where the primary source was. Carcinoma works cunningly from the inside out. Detection and treatment often work more slowly and gropingly, from the outside in. Many needles were sunk into my clavicle area—“Tissue is the issue” being a hot slogan in the local Tumorville tongue—and I was told the biopsy results might take a week.

Working back from the cancer-ridden squamous cells that these first results disclosed, it took rather longer than that to discover the disagreeable truth. The word “metastasized” was the one in the report that first caught my eye, and ear. The alien had colonized a bit of my lung as well as quite a bit of my lymph node. And its original base of operations was located—had been located for quite some time—in my esophagus. My father had died, and very swiftly, too, of cancer of the esophagus. He was 79. I am 61. In whatever kind of a “race” life may be, I have very abruptly become a finalist.

The notorious stage theory of Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, whereby one progresses from denial to rage through bargaining to depression and the eventual bliss of “acceptance,” hasn’t so far had much application in my case. In one way, I suppose, I have been “in denial” for some time, knowingly burning the candle at both ends and finding that it often gives a lovely light. But for precisely that reason, I can’t see myself smiting my brow with shock or hear myself whining about how it’s all so unfair: I have been taunting the Reaper into taking a free scythe in my direction and have now succumbed to something so predictable and banal that it bores even me. Rage would be beside the point for the same reason. Instead, I am badly oppressed by a gnawing sense of waste. I had real plans for my next decade and felt I’d worked hard enough to earn it. Will I really not live to see my children married? To watch the World Trade Center rise again? To read—if not indeed write—the obituaries of elderly villains like Henry Kissinger and Joseph Ratzinger? But I understand this sort of non-thinking for what it is: sentimentality and self-pity. Of course my book hit the best-seller list on the day that I received the grimmest of news bulletins, and for that matter the last flight I took as a healthy-feeling person (to a fine, big audience at the Chicago Book Fair) was the one that made me a million-miler on United Airlines, with a lifetime of free upgrades to look forward to. But irony is my business and I just can’t see any ironies here: would it be less poignant to get cancer on the day that my memoirs were remaindered as a box-office turkey, or that I was bounced from a coach-class flight and left on the tarmac? To the dumb question “Why me?” the cosmos barely bothers to return the reply: Why not?

The bargaining stage, though. Maybe there’s a loophole here. The oncology bargain is that, in return for at least the chance of a few more useful years, you agree to submit to chemotherapy and then, if you are lucky with that, to radiation or even surgery. So here’s the wager: you stick around for a bit, but in return we are going to need some things from you. These things may include your taste buds, your ability to concentrate, your ability to digest, and the hair on your head. This certainly appears to be a reasonable trade. Unfortunately, it also involves confronting one of the most appealing clichés in our language. You’ve heard it all right. People don’t have cancer: they are reported to be battling cancer. No well-wisher omits the combative image: You can beat this. It’s even in obituaries for cancer losers, as if one might reasonably say of someone that they died after a long and brave struggle with mortality. You don’t hear it about long-term sufferers from heart disease or kidney failure.

Myself, I love the imagery of struggle. I sometimes wish I were suffering in a good cause, or risking my life for the good of others, instead of just being a gravely endangered patient. Allow me to inform you, though, that when you sit in a room with a set of other finalists, and kindly people bring a huge transparent bag of poison and plug it into your arm, and you either read or don’t read a book while the venom sack gradually empties itself into your system, the image of the ardent soldier or revolutionary is the very last one that will occur to you. You feel swamped with passivity and impotence: dissolving in powerlessness like a sugar lump in water.

It’s quite something, this chemo-poison. It has caused me to lose about 14 pounds, though without making me feel any lighter. It has cleared up a vicious rash on my shins that no doctor could ever name, let alone cure. (Some venom, to get rid of those furious red dots without a struggle.) Let it please be this mean and ruthless with the alien and its spreading dead-zone colonies. But as against that, the death-dealing stuff and life-preserving stuff have also made me strangely neuter. I was fairly reconciled to the loss of my hair, which began to come out in the shower in the first two weeks of treatment, and which I saved in a plastic bag so that it could help fill a floating dam in the Gulf of Mexico. But I wasn’t quite prepared for the way that my razorblade would suddenly go slipping pointlessly down my face, meeting no stubble. Or for the way that my newly smooth upper lip would begin to look as if it had undergone electrolysis, causing me to look a bit too much like somebody’s maiden auntie. (The chest hair that was once the toast of two continents hasn’t yet wilted, but so much of it was shaved off for various hospital incisions that it’s a rather patchy affair.) I feel upsettingly de-natured. If Penélope Cruz were one of my nurses, I wouldn’t even notice. In the war against Thanatos, if we must term it a war, the immediate loss of Eros is a huge initial sacrifice.

These are my first raw reactions to being stricken. I am quietly resolved to resist bodily as best I can, even if only passively, and to seek the most advanced advice. My heart and blood pressure and many other registers are now strong again: indeed, it occurs to me that if I didn’t have such a stout constitution I might have led a much healthier life thus far. Against me is the blind, emotionless alien, cheered on by some who have long wished me ill. But on the side of my continued life is a group of brilliant and selfless physicians plus an astonishing number of prayer groups. On both of these I hope to write next time if—as my father invariably said—I am spared.

© 2010 Condé Nast Digital

from newyorker.com


A reclusive soul, played by Robert Duvall, lives in a creaking house. What the locals know of him is sketchy, so they color it in with wild imaginings: he is a bogeyman, almost a beast, and not to be approached. That was the case with Boo Radley, whom Duvall played in “To Kill a Mockingbird,” his film début, in 1962, and it remains the case in his latest film, “Get Low.” The bright-blond thatch of hair is long gone, replaced by the tangled beard of a prophet. The smooth young face of Boo, with bruise-like circles around the eyes, now bears the ruts of time, but some things haven’t changed. Duvall (whose father was an admiral) is still the standard-bearer for containment—somebody the surrounding characters, like the viewing public, respect and even fear, yet by no means the owner of a cold heart. We lean toward him, seeking to learn more, only to find that his secrets will not be yielded up so easily. Hence the Duvall smile: not quite readable, and never far away, amused by our reliance on the world’s unsteady show, and by his own surprising place on center stage.

In “Get Low,” he plays Felix Bush, who lives alone in the woods, in Tennessee, cooking rabbits and chopping wood. Early on, we see him changing a sign on his property from “No Trespassing” to “No Damn Trespassing,” which is a cute way of telling us that here is a curmudgeon of the first order. When he ventures into the nearby town, someone throws a stone at him, and the speed with which the old man catches and beats the culprit suggests that age has not withered him but toughened him up. Felix is the type of fellow who gets up in the dark to stalk through the rain because he forgot to feed his mule. Falling asleep in the stable, he wakes in a pure blue morning, and talks to the dumb animal as if that were the only company he needed.

The task of “Get Low,” which was written by Chris Provenzano and C. Gaby Mitchell and directed by Aaron Schneider, is to draw the scowling Felix from his lair. He visits a funeral parlor, run by Frank Quinn. “I’m after a funeral,” Felix says. “Boy, are you in luck,” Quinn replies. We are in the nineteen-thirties, and times are no less hard in the funeral trade than in any other. “One thing about Chicago: people knew how to die,” Quinn says of happier days. When I tell you that Quinn is played by Bill Murray, you will gather—you will instantly hear, in your head—just how much spin, at once glum and energetic, these lines can bear. The great discovery that Murray has donated to cinema is that the drug of deadpan need not be a downer; bewilderingly, it can be an upper, even when you clearly have a heap of things to be down about, plus a face that looks like yesterday’s cinnamon Danish. It’s a treat to see that doughiness set off against Duvall’s severity. Add Sissy Spacek, effortlessly natural as a former flame of Felix’s, now widowed and flickering with regret, and we get a rich spread of dramatic styles. Those three actors have a combined age of almost two hundred. There must be youngbloods in Hollywood who can match them, but none spring to mind.

The funeral that Felix desires is his own. Moreover, he wishes to be alive and present at the obsequies. “I want everybody to come who’s got a story to tell about me,” he declares, and at this point I sensed the movie swivel away from what feels lean and locked-in about Felix and toward the folksy—just an inch or so, but too far. “A thousand years ago, he was the most interesting man I’d ever met,” the widow says, and Felix now starts to rekindle that interest, sprucing himself up, inviting the townsfolk to attend the service, and travelling across the state to unearth an elderly preacher who will speak at it. There will even be a lottery, whose winner will inherit Felix’s land.

In short, our hermit is resocialized. “A man must be clothed with society, or we shall feel a certain bareness and poverty,” Emerson wrote, in an essay from 1857 called “Society and Solitude,” and Schneider’s film can be taken as an act of obeisance to that decree. The clothing is literal, and very plush it is, too; half the characters, who seem suspiciously plump with health for Depression-era country folk, are clad in a mixture of soft leather, herringbone tweeds, fur collars, and silk scarves, all of it beautifully photographed, by David Boyd, against a backdrop of smoke grays and autumnal browns. But what end does the beauty serve? Does it not, like the screenplay’s total elision of racial unease, hasten the gentling of a harsh tale? Think of the spare, almost desiccated grace with which Buñuel and his cameraman, Gabriel Figueroa, filmed “Simon of the Desert” (1965), another saga of a friendless spirit. Buñuel could afford to be dry, humoring the lofty ascetic motives of his hero, whereas a director like Schneider, though fixated on period detail, is utterly modern in his sensibility, his moral duty being to bring Felix back into the fold, as if loneliness were an insult to our common ideals.

The funeral is a lively affair, yet it signals the demise of the movie. There is a carnival air, with food being grilled and fiddle music played, but Felix, largely in closeup, takes the microphone and confesses to an ancient sin. He is wholly in earnest, of course, no more likely to fool us than if he were sitting on Oprah’s sofa. Had I been in that crowd, I would have been tempted to shout, Don’t tell us, old man! Keep your mystery, and your land, to yourself! Duvall could have done it; imagine him bending down to whisper his guilt into Spacek’s ear, with Murray close by, eavesdropping, and the rest of us shut out. Or imagine if Felix had died beforehand, leaving his baffled mourners to do the whispering. “Get Low” is deftly played, and it rarely mislays its ambling charm, but what a forbidding fable it could have been if the truth about Felix Bush, rather than emerging into sunlight, had slunk back into the woods.

© 2010 Condé Nast Digital

From Daily Mubi:

"You're giving him a pass because he's..." "Oh I hate it when X gets a pass from the critics." You've read, or heard, complaints such as this before. Indeed, in this era of enhanced noise-making capabilities and meta-criticism, the disdain of the ostensible critical pass—that is, making allowances for, or going a little easy on, a particular work by a particular director just because you're a fan of that director's prior work—and its concommitant implication of bad critical faith,has become increasingly and dispiritingly common, with even reliably astute critics such as A.O. Scott resorting to it (in his notice on Scorsese's Shutter Island). My friend Joshua Rothkopf's pan of the latest Jacques Rivette film is almost entirely predicated on the don't-trust-those-pernicious-auteurists-who-are-giving-a-pass-to-this-now-feeble-old-master idea. Which gains a new and weird dimension if you follow the gossip on certain esoteric websites and message boards, which spreads the scuttlebutt that this old master is in such poor condition that he in fact did not even direct most of his latest film, and that much of the work on the ground was done by one of Rivette's longtime scenarists, Pascal Bonitzer. "Where's your auteurist credibility now?" one hears in the back of one's mind, drawled in the most Robinsonesque tones of disdain.

And of course the retrospective of films directed by Clint Eastwood currently unspooling at the Film Society of Lincoln Center's Walter Reade Theater brings to mind the counterreactions to the positive reviews of last winter's Invictus, and other Eastwood-directed films of recent years; that certain critics, so thoroughly enamored of Eastwood—not just Eastwood the director, but Eastwood the man, the myth, the legend—are just so thoroughly enamored that they'll ignore his films' many, many, many shortcomings. To this accusation I can only personally respond: Okay, you caught me. Red handed, and dead to rights.

Of course, I do have some qualifications to offer. Followed by justifications. First off, I am not blind to the flaws in Eastwood's films; or, if I am, it's a willful blindness, or a willful suspension of what I'll call, for the nonce, judgment. And, of course, my ideas of the flaws in Eastwood's films may be different from yours. I do not believe, for instance, that 1971's Play Misty For Me is an ideological construction of deplorable misogyny, but I do object to Eastwood's use of the zoom lens in some of the picture's more intense scenes (and example of a resolution of such a shot is the illustration for this article). On the other hand, the homosexual villain portrayed by Jack Cassidy in 1975's The Eiger Sanction is a distasteful and hateful caricature, only slightly ameliorated by the ridiculous relish with which Cassidy attacks the role. I have no idea why Eastwood cast Warren Clarke, who everybody knew as "Dim" from A Clockwork Orange, to play a Soviet in Firefox (1982). Maybe 'cause Nadsat is derived from Russian? That John Huston impersonation in White Hunter, Black Heart is a little forced. And don't even bring up the monkey movies; Lincoln Center isn't. More seriously, yes, those who get on Million Dollar Baby's case for having its entire scenario play out in a terrifically implausible media vacuum, but on the other hand, as John Wayne didn't say in Stagecoach, there are some things that a man has to run away from, and Eastwood knew that he could not have contrived the heart-stopping moment he engineered for the film's climax had he enabled Hilary Swank's character to Google "macushla."

So no, his films are not without flaws, and I imagine I could enumerate them all day. But I still take him very seriously as a director. (I'm reminded, if I may, of a funny story; around spring 1981, standing outside Cinema Village, waiting to go into a rep screening of The Shining and The Killing ["a very instructive double bill," one patron commented while exiting] with some friends and listening to a couple of eager cinema beavers discussing Eastwood's directorial career and making a remark about Eastwood only finding his "water level" as a director with The Outlaw Josey Wales or some such. One of my friends drolly imagined recasting that scene out of Annie Hall with Eastwood, in his Dirty Harry persona, appearing from behind the line and drawing a bead on one of these guys with his Magnum, and saying "What do you know about my filmmaking...punk?"...Maybe you hadda be there...) And it is largely because I enjoy his directorial, or some might say storytelling, "company." Which might be another way of saying that one enjoys his "personality," as it were? Is, in fact, Eastwood the director I would most like to have a beer with, if I still drank beer, and is that a sufficient critical defense?

Maybe. But I can also cite some textual defenses. I esteem Eastwood as a director as much for what he doesn't do as for what he does do. A good example for me is the identification-of-the-body scene early on in 2003's Mystic River. The wrenching moment when Sean Penn's neighborhood badass kingpin has to face up to the fact that the daughter he was supposed to be able to protect has fallen prey to a deranged murderer. You know how this scene would have gone in any number of Hollywood iterations of it: a low-angle shot of Penn's character walking through the corridor of the hospital in slow-motion, haloed by the flourescent lights, followed shortly thereafter by a shot of him screaming "Nooooooo!!!" also in slow-motion, maybe with the sound dropping out and all, just so the audience could get a good look at Penn's intense face...

But Eastwood plays the scene absolutely straight, almost to the point of banality, standard camera setups, no slow or stuttered motion, and it's the quiet of it, the eerie matter-of-factness, that makes it so wrenching. One might say that as a director he has very conventional ways of being unconventional. Or you could just say that when it counts the most, Eastwood gives it to you straight. In a piece originally published in Positif, later reprinted in the invaluable Projections 8 1/2, Eastwood waxes slightly peevish about In The Line Of Fire director Wolfgang Petersen, recalling how thrown off the director was by having to rearrange an Eastwood entrance so that a bruise on the side of Eastwood's head wouldn't be visible in the shot. Petersen had the shot arranges just so, and re-imagining it was rather arduous for him. Had Eastwood's old mentor Don Siegel been behind the camera, Eastwood argued, the problem would have been fixed within a few minutes. I recalled this while recently watching Eastwood's underrated 1997 thriller Absolute Power, particularly the opening scenes, in which Eastwood's character, an aging cat burglar, inadvertently becomes witness to a homicide involving the President of the United States. Almost entirely dialogue-free, it's very simple champ-contrechamp stuff (sorry, the French really does sound better than "shot/reverse shot"), but almost breathtaking in its directness. Yes, maybe it is a little highfalutin to call Eastwood the last serious man in Hollywood, or the last classicist. But it's not too far to go to say at his best, Eastwood simply does not do cinematic bullshit. (And no, he's not always at his best, and yes, Jeffrey Donovan's tooth-sucking baddie in Changeling does skate pretty close to the BS border...)

As for his last release, Invictus, whose box-office failure gave its detractors a nice unearned smug chuckle, here too is a pertinent example of Eastwood benignly confounding audience expectations. Rather than a triumph-of-the-human-spirit "sports" movie, the director serves up a narrative about practical/pragmatic politics and the iconography/semiotics of sports and its relation to national/nationalistic pride and/or fellow feeling, and is overall so smart about it that its occasional lapses into sentimentality (the Robben Island scene), which would not seem entirely egregious in the more expected version of this film, come off as a bit sloppy and ill-advised. As long as Eastwood continues to disarm in this particular way, applying a scrupulous, searching but never ostentatious intelligence to whatever theme that's piqued his interest, he will have his pass with me. So there. And now, my question for the detractors: Would you be so inclined to call him "sloppy" or "indifferent" if you were in fact completely unaware of the brisk efficiency of his working methods? And if so, what textual evidence would you cite in that case?

MUBI ©2008-2010

Whole lotta cantin' going on - Roger Ebert's Journal

Can a film be great without question? Is it demented to find fault with "Inception?" Or "Citizen Kane?" Not at all. Scolds have emerged in recent days to smack at those critics who disapproved of "Inception," but as a fervent admirer of the film I can understand why others might not agree. In fact, the reasons cited by David Edelstein in his much-attacked negative review seem reasonable. I don't agree with him, but that's another matter.


I've been trying to think of one film that everyone reading this entry might agree is unquestionably great. You might think I'd name "Citizen Kane" or "The Rules of the Game," the two films that in recent decades have consistently been at the top of Sight & Sound magazines' poll of the world's directors and cineastes. But no. I've taught both shot-by-shot and had many students who confessed they didn't feel the greatness. There are people Bergman doesn't reach. And Ozu. I've never met anyone who doesn't like Hitchcock, but I promise you I will in the comments under this entry. Many Hitchcock fans don't admire "Vertigo," which I think is his best film.

"The Godfather," I think, comes closest to being a film everyone agrees about. It's currently #2 on the (debatable) IMDb list of the 250 greatest films of all time. "The Shawshank Redemption" is #1, and in the #3 position is..."Inception." It will drop. The first two have 900,000 votes between them, and "Inception" only 20,000.



All the same, if you say you dislike "The Godfather" or "Shawshank," I can't say you're wrong. The one thing you can never be wrong about is your own opinion. It's when you start giving your reasons that you lay yourself open. Many years ago there was a critic in Chicago who said "The Valachi Papers" was a better film than "The Godfather." "Phil," I told him, "film criticism is a matter of subjective opinion. Only rarely does it stray into objective fact. When you said 'The Valachi Papers' was better than 'The Godfather,' that was an error of objective fact."

Edelstein wrote: "Inception is full of brontosaurean effects, like the city that folds over on top of itself, but the tone is so solemn I felt out of line even cracking a smile. It lacks the nimbleness of Spielberg's Minority Report or the Jungian-carnival bravado of Joseph Ruben's Dreamscape or the eerily clean lines and stylized black-suited baddies of The Matrix--or, for that matter, the off-kilter intensity of Nolan's own Insomnia. The attackers in Inception are anonymous, the tone flat and impersonal. Nolan is too literal-minded, too caught up in ticktock logistics, to make a great, untethered dream movie."



Edelstein is correct in his comparisons with the other films. "Inception" does lack those qualities. I love his phrase "ticktock logistics," and plan to steal it. In my case, I didn't crack a smile while watching the film because Nolan didn't call for one, nor was I looking for the qualities David found in the other films. I found it refreshing that Nolan's villains didn't wear matching uniforms (do the bad guys in "The Matrix" and the Bond movies all share locker rooms?). It's true that Nolan is literal-minded and logistical, but I believe the film depends on the conceit that you can think your way into someone else's dream with your own intelligence. The last thing he wanted was an untethered dream movie. Nolan successfully made the film he had in mind, and shouldn't be faulted for failing to make someone else's film.

Edelstein concludes: "The movie is a metaphor for the power of delusional hype--a metaphor for itself." This is a statement with a certain appeal. The notorious thing about metaphors, as everyone who has ever graded student papers knows, is that almost anything can be read as a metaphor of whatever you want it to be. (The New Yorker used to have fillers headed, Block that metaphor!) But Edelstein is right that "Inception" was preceded by enormous hype on the internet. Only once you had seen it, of course, could you decide if it was delusional hype.



It's unlikely Nolan anticipated the "delusional hype" and made "Inception" as a preemptive metaphor, but you never know. Still, I understand where Edelstein is coming from. I can understand how a critic could react to the film in his way. His review is justified and valuable, more stimulating to a lover of the film than still more praise. It helps you to see it. If you don't agree with his litany of faults, you have to ask yourself, why not?

Compare Edelstein with Armond White, whose review joins David's in the dock at the current online heresy trial. White calls "Inception" a "con game," and explains: "Its essential con is that, as in 'Memento,' Nolan ignores the morality of his characters' actions; he accepts that they will do anything--which is the cynicism critics admired in 'Memento,' the con-man's motivating nihilism."

White is correct to say Nolan ignores morality, but is he correct to think that's a fault? Does White admire other films that ignore morality? What about "Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen," which he found superior to "Toy Story 3?" White doesn't say why a film shouldn't ignore morality. Where does Bunuel fit into his view? Actually, we learn, Nolan lacks not only morality, but basic craftsmanship: "Nolan doesn't have a born filmmaker's natural gift for detail, composition and movement." Then what is White's idea of great composition? Of "Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen," he writes: "In the history of motion pictures, Bay has created the best canted angles--ever."



Ever? Many would argue that "The Third Man" makes a better use of canted angles. You could also make a case for "Night and the City," and indeed "Citizen Kane." If pressed, I might be able to make a case for every noir ever made. But never mind. White never illustrates how Nolan's compositions are lacking. He cites no shots that are badly canted. He assumes artistic gifts are "natural," implying filmmakers are born, not made, thus coming down on the side of genetics against environment. Maybe he's right, but it would take an essay to defend that sentence.

Edelstein's review describes the film I saw, and deals with it. White dismisses the film with preemptive contempt for anyone caught enjoying it. Edelstein's review is about the film. White's review is about charlatans defrauding the ignorant with snake oil. There are, of course, other dissenting reviews of "Inception." Matthew Zoller Seitz, didn't like the film, and tweeted this about Steven Boone's review on the new site Capital:



Boone's review fits my definition of usefulness. It doesn't matter whether I agree with him. He helps me see things. So, always, does Stanley Kauffmann. That Seitz praised the Boone review and was even moved by it, implies something good to know about him as a critic. He wasn't doing it simply because he agreed.

There's a human tendency to resent anyone who disagrees with our pleasures. The less mature interpret that as a personal attack on themselves. They're looking for support and vindication. In the area of movies, no phenomenon has dramatized this more than the rise of Rotten Tomatoes. When a movie is running at 100% on the Tomatometer, an inevitable death watch occurs, as readers await the first negative vote. Recently the perfect ratings for "Toy Story 3" and "Inception" were "spoiled" by Armond White. There was outrage. The Twitterverse was in flames. A. O. Scott and 22 others also disliked the film, but it was White who got the attention, because he has been cast as the spoiler. As many actors will tell you, it's more fun to be the villain than the hero. Actually, the Meter on "Inception" is holding at around 84%, but that's small consolation for some of its fans. They require perfection.

It's possible that if the Tomatometer didn't exist Armond White would attract attention only from those readers who actually wanted to read what he wrote. There would be a lot; he's not boring, and is capable of wicked insights. It's also possible that there's a method in the manner he uses to assiduously vote against the grain--which is why the Tomatometer can be mischievous.



In the "open marketplace of ideas," it is believed, the better ones will eventually rise to the top. Sites like Rotten Tomatoes are where critics bring their ideas to market, but some readers come only to window-shop. It is a melancholy fact that for some, ideas have been replaced by the Meter reading itself. It doesn't matter nearly so much what anyone actually said, as whether "everyone" agrees with you.

This is not a hypothetical conversation:

"What did the critics say?"

"Seventy-three."


I've seen it claimed on the web that Armond White said "Grand Theft Auto" (the video game, I assume, not the movie) was better than "Inception." He did no such thing. He compared them. He wrote: "Like 'Grand Theft Auto's' quasi-cinematic extension of noir and action-flick plots, 'Inception' manipulates the digital audience's delectation for relentless subterfuge." This is true. He assumes such a parallel would be bad. The point is that some of White's attackers never actually read his review. That wasn't necessary.

For some fans, what was necessary was to find validation for their opinions. The Tomatometer, Metacritic, MRQE, Movie Review Intelligence, and the IMDb User Score are easy places to do that. What it comes down to is, you "liked" it and so you require everyone else to "like" it too. When I attacked "Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen," I got 874 comments. About 600 of them were outraged, and most of those were offended that I disagreed with them.

So what? I thought "Dark City" was the best film of its year and "Synecdoche, NY" the best film of its decade. I was in the minority both times. Long years ago, I was also in the minority in my love for "Bonnie and Clyde" and "2001." Lots of people, right at the first, disagreed. That's the way it goes. I was outraged, but not about some goofy meter reading.

© 2010 Sun-Times Media, LLC 

From Notcoming.com
Let the Right One In
LÅT DEN RÄTTE KOMMA IN / SWEDEN / 2008
They’re like us, just not quite. Vampires are perfect for manifesting our fears about our fellow humans and ourselves because they don’t just kill; they corrupt. And unlike zombies or werewolves, they don’t so much maul their victims as they seduce them. Perhaps unavoidably, bloodsucking love stories are a hallmark of the horror genre, sometimes grim and affecting, sometimes embarrassingly rote. Let the Right One In, the acclaimed vampire film from Sweden, falls happily into the former category, but don’t mistake it for being instantly or even easily embraceable. Director Tomas Alfredson has crafted a beautiful and atmospheric film, rife with haunting, wintry imagery and fine performances from his stars. But as enjoyable as it is, as compelling as it is, it’s a gnarly picture and a troubling one, where questions are left unanswered and the viewer is left uneasy. I have the sense that this is the type of film that one returns to, one that will seem to shift and change with each viewing the way the central vampire character’s voice and facial features subtly morph at key moments in the film. (Trick of the light? I wondered at such moments, caught somewhere between the urge to lean in closer and the impulse to recoil.)

As others have observed, Let the Right One In melds horror with the conventions of coming-of-age stories and pangs of youthful romance. Nothing new, that; but Let the Right One In is wonderfully worrying because it doesn’t attempt to deny the horrors perpetrated by its unavoidably parasitic vampire figure. It doesn’t layer on pretty gothic trappings, nor does it work to smooth the way for its star-crossed lovers by offering (as one of my favorite films, Near Dark, unabashedly does) an attainable, happy late-inning solution. It allows us, to the very last, to doubt. This is a story that could have gone on long after the film wraps up, a story that does go on in one’s mind long after the theater lights have come up and everyone’s gone home.

The story begins with Oskar, a picked-on twelve-year-old who hums as he assembles a scrapbook collection of newspaper clippings detailing grim killings. He’s lonely and unhappy until the night he meets Eli, a mysterious figure who he takes to be a girl his own age. Alfredson trusts us to know better; Eli’s first appearance – perched on a jungle gym in a way that’s just odd and precarious enough to convey a certain otherworldliness – is strange and striking, balancing innocence and menace. It’s quite the image, and actress Lina Leandersson keeps us off-balance as Eli, invoking contradictory qualities throughout her excellent performance. Leandersson can play the predator as well as the nervous adolescent, and her contribution to the film is immeasurable.

Just as vital is young actor Kåre Hedebrant, who plays Oskar with a similarly engaging mixture of winning guilelessness and burgeoning disturbance. It’s in seeing Eli through Oskar’s eyes that we grow sympathetic to the vampire’s plight (I can’t forget the sweetly smitten look that spreads across Oskar’s face following some early interactions with Eli involving a Rubik’s cube.). and his acceptance of a creature of the night into his life carries something admirable in it, as dubious as that may sound outside of the context of the film.

Consider Oskar’s handling of Eli’s ambiguous gender, an element that screenwriter John Ajvide Lindqvist has quietly held over in adapting his own novel. (The underplayed implication is that Eli is a castrated boy.) One of the most striking developments in the story is how unconcerned Oskar is with which body parts Eli has, or has had, or has forcibly removed from someone else. Oskar is simply in love, and his shrugging devotion is endearing, if also pretty unsettling when it comes to that whole draining-humans-of their blood aspect of Eli’s life. (Is pairing gender ambiguity with genuine monstrosity potentially problematic? Yeah. But Lindqvist treats Eli’s gender as something of an incidental. Plus, the macho, more traditionally masculine bullies who torment Oskar ultimately come across as the story’s most sadistic characters.)

Alfredson and Lindqvist have fashioned a marvelous love story here because it does not deny how damaging love can be. New York Times critic Manohla Dargis has lengthily discussed the relationship of the film’s English language title to Morrissey’s song “Let the Right One Slip In,” and the film pulses and sparkles with the wry humor and pointed sadness of your favorite Smiths song. The title also aptly refers to the vampire’s traditional inability to enter a room without being invited, which becomes a metaphor for that most anxious aspect of human relationships—deciding who to let into to your heart. What could be more terrifying than that? Mixing tenderness with savagery, Let the Right One In gains great power from its refusal to soothe our fears.
© 2008 NOTCOMING.COM

From Notcoming.com......


Is it possible for a work of art to be too complicated to be appreciated? Composer Fred Lerdahl addresses this topic in his essay “Cognitive Constraints on Compositional Systems” in which he examines the relationship between the construction of avant-garde music and the listener’s reception of it. He suggests that a point exists where a piece of music becomes too complicated to be understood, noting that some modern works pursue “complicatedness as compensation for a lack of complexity.” Here, Lerdahl makes a distinction between the artifice of being “complicated,” the quality of being consciously constructed to be difficult, and being “complex,” a natural state of emotional and creative depth. He summarizes his thesis by stating, in essence, that some music is too complicated to be appreciated or enjoyed by listeners.

While I find Lerdahl’s argument myopic, based as it is on the assumption that an enjoyment of complicated art is physiologically impossible, it can be used as an intriguing vantage point from which to begin to analyze a film. Lerdahl’s thesis does not address the topic of film studies, but the argument of complexity and its relationship to artistic merit has been voiced often. Is it possible for a film to be too difficult for viewers?

This question has a special relevance to David Lynch’s Lost Highway: “too difficult” and “overly complicated” being the two most frequent criticisms of the film. Anyone familiar with Lynch’s oeuvre will immediately recognize the irony of singling out one of his films as being especially difficult, but Lost Highway remains a polarizing work, even among his fans. The film was not received warmly by audiences or critics and it remains Lynch’s most overlooked, and perhaps underestimated, film. Contrary to Lerdahl’s analysis of art, I maintain that works that present the greatest challenge to the audience are invaluable and offer a vastly more rewarding experience, and it is my assertion that Lost Highway is such a film. To dismiss it as merely complicated is to ignore the complexity of the film, the layers of perception and understanding that Lynch works with, and depth of emotions on display. Terrifying, confounding, and sublimely beautiful, Lost Highway is not a film that defies analysis but rather one that demands it.

Lost Highway begins with saxophonist Fred Madison trapped in a crumbling marriage to the beautiful Renee, who remains an enigma to him, perhaps purposefully so. He suspects her of being unfaithful but is derailed in his pursuit of the truth by the encroachment of the uncanny into his life. Every morning, Madison wakes to find a videotape on his front step without evidence as to who has left it and for what purpose. The first tape shows an innocuous view of his home’s exterior, but subsequent tapes reveal that someone has been inside their home without their knowledge. Already in a state of unease, Fred has a chance encounter with a mysterious, white-faced man at a party, who disturbingly tells him that he is currently inside Madison’s home and even allows Fred to call him using his cell phone. Fred searches the house upon his return that night, finding nothing. The next morning, he views the now-expected tape left outside to see himself having apparently killed Renee.

Sentenced to death, Fred tries in vain to remember the events of that night and begins having intense headaches. His cries of agony are ignored by the guards and when they check his cell the next morning, Madison is gone. In his place is a young mechanic named Pete Dayton. Pete has no memory of how he got into Madison’s cell or of the days prior to that. He returns to his parents’ home and resumes his normal life of his job, friends, and girlfriend Sheila. He begins an affair with the gorgeous Alice Wakefield, the lover of vicious mobster Mr. Eddy and, unbeknownst to Pete, a dead-ringer for Renee. Mr. Eddy, who is known to police as “Dick Laurent,” learns of the affair and plans to deal with Pete and Alice severely with the help of Madison’s Mystery Man. Alice offers Pete a way out of their predicament and leads him into a web of theft and murder, during which Pete begins to suffer from intense headaches and strange hallucinations. The episodes become more violent when Alice reveals that she has tricked him and Pete finds himself transformed into Fred Madison. Fred is once again confronted by the Mystery Man and he struggles to connect the links between himself, Pete Dayton, Renee, Alice, Mr. Eddy, and Dick Laurent.

The mistake people make with Lost Highway is to search for one concrete meaning. The film is, metaphorically, a puzzle, and the temptation is there to view it as a literal puzzle as well. It is incorrect to assume that if one analyzes individual pieces that connections will appear, pieces will begin falling into place one after the other, and eventually a complete picture or construct will emerge. To attempt to definitively ascribe meaning to any aspect of the film is to limit one’s experience of it. Once you’ve assigned a meaning to a flash of blue light, a headache, or even the color of Fred Madison’s bed linens, you’ve effectively prevented them from being anything else. This method of thinking runs counter to the film’s recurrent themes and its internal filmic logic. Lost Highway is a film about moving, changing, becoming something and someone else—to assume a concrete meaning in any of it is to arrest this process.

The idea of transformation as an ongoing – and possibly endless – process is key to Lost Highway. Three of the film’s main characters have multiple identities, Fred/Pete, Renee/Alice, and Dick Laurent/Mr. Eddy, all of which seem to exist simultaneously. It shouldn’t be taken as a coincidence that the lives of these three characters are linked, nor should it be assumed that the other characters do not have doubles because they aren’t shown. Renee/Alice and Dick Laurent/Mr. Eddy fail to complete the transformative process, as Fred murders one half of their binary identities. In doing so, Fred emerges as the only being capable of constant change—successfully merging both aspects of his identity as evidenced by his ability to remember Pete’s life after he physically shifts back to Fred’s body.

The “Lost Highway” itself is the film’s primary metaphor and the one in which this theme of transformation is best seen. Lost Highway is a metaphysical road movie, concerned with the distance between one state of being and another rather than that between two points on a map. There are echoes of the country song “Lost Highway,” written by Leon Payne but popularized by Hank Williams, throughout the film, particularly the line, “a woman’s lies make a life like mine.” Fred travels the “lost highway” in the film, literally lost in another identity as Pete before finding his way again and returning to his true identity. When Fred reemerges, he does so with a greater understanding of what is happening, an understanding that is not explicitly shared with the audience. He acts with a greater sense of purpose after returning, hunting down Mr. Eddy/Dick Laurent for his transgressions against him in both lives and visiting himself in the past to make sure the cycle of rebirth is started. The closing scene of the film shows Fred on the “lost highway” again, both in the sense of being on the abandoned desert road and beginning his transformation into yet another identity.

The most popular theory on Lost Highway revolves around a term that Lynch mentioned in interviews for the film and in his book, Catching the Big Fish: “psychogenic fugue.” A psychogenic fugue, or fugue state, is a type of dissociative amnesia and is typically marked by the patient constructing a new identity with no memories of their past life or the traumatic event which triggered the state. In this reading of the film, Fred Madison murders his wife, Renee, because he suspects she has been unfaithful. While awaiting his execution, Fred enters a fugue state where he imagines himself to be Pete Dayton.

There are problems with the fugue state theory and Lynch’s reluctance to commit to this as a definitive reading of the film suggests that there is more at work than selective amnesia and Fred’s dream of a better life. One main problem with the theory is that it places a primacy on the Fred Madison portion of the narrative over Pete Dayton’s. This bias likely arises from the experience of watching the film: Madison is introduced first, and actor Bill Pullman appears on the promotional materials for the film and is “the star,” for lack of a better term, therefore the audience will view whatever he does as more important.

Perhaps the biggest problem with the fugue state theory is that it ignores the supernatural elements in Madison’s story. It is Madison that interacts with Robert Blake’s Mystery Man, who displays the ability to be in two places at once (bi-location) and to appear out of thin air (teleportation). Madison’s initial conversation with the Mystery Man is best explained by his response (“That’s fucking crazy, man”), but it is this conversation that gives a glimpse of how the supernatural has seeped into Madison’s life. He is being haunted, but by whom or what remains a question, and there is the possibility that he is haunting himself, in a manner of speaking.

I would argue that there are multiple Fred Madisons present in the film prior to the introduction of Pete Dayton. The visual similarities between the Madison home and Twin Peaks’ Red Room cannot be discounted. Both locations are the loci of change and supernatural events in their respective works and through viewing the home in this manner, Lost Highway’s maze of doppelgangers and multiple identities is given some clarity. Upon returning from Andy’s party, Fred disappears into the blackness of the red hallway. We next see him gazing at his face in the mirror, not unlike Agent Cooper in the last scene of Twin Peaks’ series finale. At this point, he is no longer Fred, nor is he specifically located in the Madison home, as shown through Renee’s failure to get a response to her calls for him. It is quite possible that Fred is someone else when he returns and it is this other being that murders Renee, thus explaining his inability to recall the event as genuine rather than selective amnesia.

The mysterious videotapes left on Fred’s doorstep every morning are one of the most unsettling plot points in film history, rivaling the most visceral horrors in their power to unnerve. There is no logical explanation for them. If the Mystery Man made them, their purpose seems to be only to torment Fred. If they are Fred’s repressed memories – as is often stated in the fugue state theory – then it seems odd that it would be Renee who initially finds them and that Fred would be recalling the events in the third person. It is important to note that the final tape does not show Fred murdering Renee, but rather him kneeling next to her corpse: perhaps another clue to Fred’s innocence.

The film’s first scene of Fred Madison using the intercom to tell Fred Madison that “Dick Laurent is dead” is difficult to satisfactorily explain using the fugue state theory or any other type of analysis. This scene shows Fred after the events of the film take place speaking to Fred before the events of the film take place, yet occurs first chronologically. This scene is one of the more problematic for those attempting to establish a clear meaning for every event in the film, but it is one that is especially illuminating for what I feel to be the more appropriate reading, one in which all aspects (time, meaning, identity) are transient and constantly changing. This scene depicts Fred simultaneously existing in two times, two places, and in two states of being, hinting a further connection between Fred and the Mystery Man since they display the same abilities.

During the interviews preceding the release of Lost Highway, Lynch responded to an interviewer’s pressure for an explanation of the film with, “When it comes down to explaining things, I stop. With most films, there is problem understanding them, there’s no room to dream or to find your own interpretation and I don’t want my thing to get in the way of anybody else’s idea.” Lost Highway is an invitation to dream. It presents the viewer not with a completed narrative but with the materials with which to create their own. Your interpretation of the film will be different from mine. My own interpretation of the film will be different the next time I watch it, just as this interpretation was different than previous ones. The film’s complexity is its strength, and part of the joy of Lost Highway is that so much of it cannot be explained. Lynch has literally put us in the driver’s seat barreling down the lost highway, our faint headlights giving us only a small suggestion of what might be in surrounding darkness. It is up to us to fill that void.

© 2001–2010 notcoming.com

 From Film Freak
INCEPTION (2010)
** (out of four)
starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Ken Watanabe, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Michael Caine
written and directed by Christopher Nolan

I dunno, the wordiness of The Dark Knight didn't bother me that much. I suppose it has something to do with it being a comic-book movie and plot-driving pronouncements seeming the order of the day. I find it impossible now to think of The Dark Knight without seeing it as a corollary to No Country For Old Men: the one composed of broad, garish strokes, the other of grace notes you hesitate to call delicate, but that's just what they are. With Inception, Christopher Nolan's correlative piece is Charlie Kaufman's Synecdoche, NY, and the comparison in this instance doesn't prove mutually evocative so much as devastating to Nolan's film, exposing his shtick as reams of deadening exposition interrupted by the occasional virtuoso set-piece. It is, in other words, aggressively nothing-special, save for a few astonishing zero-g sequences. As it happens, saying the best part of Inception is its weightlessness is a pretty pithy criticism of the whole damned enterprise. For a film about dreams, it's distinctly light on possibility: armed with the power to shape reality, our erstwhile dream-weavers fold a city in half in a dorm-room Escher shout-out but decline to, you know, fly and stuff. More, Inception doesn't confront archetypes of any kind, instead retreating into some basic stuff about projections and the architecture of the unconscious being a freight elevator while relying overmuch on the built-in gravitas of father and dead-wife issues. And in case you miss any of that, Nolan crams it into the dialogue like one crams elephants into elevators. Rule of thumb: if a movie uses the word "deep" as much as this one does, it probably isn't.

Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) is an ace "extractor" in a sort of Philip K. Dick sense, in that he does weird things in a futuristic milieu and has a neat title to go along with it. As the picture opens, he washes up on some photogenic beach and gets dragged before an elderly Japanese man, Saito (the great Ken Watanabe), in a beautifully laid-out antechamber. Saito points to the contents of Cobb's pockets--a gun and a little lead top--and asks if Cobb's come to kill him. An intriguing beginning, I suppose, to one of those closed-room mysteries by John Dickson Carr, and Inception is nothing if not interested in sources. It soon becomes clear that Cobb is actually a corporate spy who invades industrialists' dreams in order to ferret out trade secrets from their heavily-guarded subconscious minds. So begins Nolan's tribute to Jules Dassin's meticulously-planned expat heist flicks. Saito hires Cobb and partner Arthur (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) after a Byzantine test of their talents convinces him they're just the men for the job--the job being to implant (to perpetrate an "inception") the germ of an idea in business rival Fischer (Cillian Murphy) that will lead Fischer to dissolve the house that daddy built because, wait for it, Fischer has Father Issues. But, problem, Cobb may be a danger to his somnambulist partners because, wait for it, he has Dead Wife (Marion Cotillard) Guilt Issues. Another pickle: their "architect" has died, meaning they need a new one, meaning there's room for Nolan's obligatory Michael Caine cameo and a role for earnest Ellen Page as architect-savant Ariadne. People with a cursory knowledge of Greek mythology take note: this is Nolan making a nod to Jung. Everyone else will probably be content to know that Ariadne is supposed to be really good at weaving stuff out of dream fabric, though it all looks like a city--oh, and a glacier--to my uninspired eyes.

In lieu of depth, Inception offers complexity; it's the philosophical/existential equivalent of a Rubik's Cube. Better, it's this generation's Spellbound (Hitchcock version), which may have seemed awfully smart to contemporary audiences but looks awfully embarrassing today--but there's a great dream sequence in that one, too, right? Cobb and his buddies hatch a series of dreams-within-dreams to trick Fischer. They intend to do this with the help of an ace pharmacologist who's carefully engineered a cocktail potent enough to keep his subjects asleep through almost any upset but leaves the inner ear "live" so the dreamers can "jolt" out of their dreamscape capers at predetermined "kicks." Ah, idioglossia. What they don't know is that Fischer's own subconscious has been drilled to react to interlopers with a...and that if their avatars die in their sleep they'll...and that Cobb just wants to go home to see his kids' faces but...and that they have to live out a scene from From Russia With Love because...and there's a vault and some "lost" number sequences, therefore...and is that Tom Berenger? What kind of dream is this? What also isn't explained well is how our dreamers manage to stay asleep when the van containing their sleeping shells flips down an embankment--what with their inner ears being "live" and all. No matter, as Inception is all, ahem, a prestige: a gaudy flourish of a film that attempts at the horrible, stomach-moving profundity of Memento's solipsism but makes a terrible hash of it in the bloat to epic size. Adapting his philosophy of the self to a bigger canvas, Nolan feeds it into the grinder of multiple explosions and a script so literal it'd be insulting if the viewer weren't distracted from it trying to keep up with its labyrinthine arbitrariness. The only thing of real interest in the picture is that it appears to be trying to define itself (that is, the medium of film itself) as an analog to the dream life--a pursuit it shares with far, far superior essays of the uncanny like Mulholland Dr., Last Year in Marienbad, and, yeah, Synecdoche, NY. The only thing of real interest in Inception, in other words, is that besides having an ingenious weightless fight and more parallel editing and slow-motion than a normal person should be forced to endure, it's possibly/maybe a gateway drug to harder stuff like Altered States and eXistenZ. Dare to dream.
-Walter Chaw


© Film Freak Central; filmfreakcentral.net.

From the New Yorker
Not long ago, in “Mother and Child,” Annette Bening played a controlling, easily angered woman who worked in a hospital and found her status as a parent challenged by unforeseen events. Now, in “The Kids Are All Right,” she opts for a complete change of tack, playing a controlling, easily angered lesbian who works in a hospital and finds her status as a parent challenged by unforeseen events. The drought of intelligent roles for women in middle age is so severe that you have to applaud Bening for seeking out these movies and making them her own, yet it would be disingenuous not to be taken aback by the harsh purpose with which so accomplished a seductress—think of her in “The Grifters” and “Bugsy”—has peeled away any trace of glamour in favor of a saturnine frown and a pursed mouth.

Her character, in the new film, is Nic, who lives in Los Angeles with her wife, Jules (Julianne Moore), and their two children—Joni (Mia Wasikowska), who was, needless to say, named after Joni Mitchell, and her younger brother, Laser (Josh Hutcherson), whose name is a less flattering fit. Joni is eighteen, a straight-A student about to leave for college, and you sense in her, behind the shyness and the curtain of long hair, a thwarted questing. It leads her to contact a guy named Paul, who, years ago, was the anonymous sperm donor picked by Nic and Jules to be the father of both children. Paul, a bearded restaurateur, turns out to be randy but unthreatening, warm to the touch but cool about stuff, with a dash of smugness in his easy smile, all of which is a way of saying that he is played by Mark Ruffalo. One of these days, someone should cast Ruffalo as a quarterback, or a Cistercian monk, just to see what happens.

“The Kids Are All Right” is directed by Lisa Cholodenko, from a script that she wrote with Stuart Blumberg, and what convinces most in her work here—as it did in her 1998 film “High Art”—is that it seems honestly torn between adventure and repose. You instantly accept the curiosity that tugs the children into tracking down Paul, even if they couldn’t explain their own reasons. Equally, you know for sure that his intrusion will bring chaos, and there is no mistaking the deep breath of relief, toward the end, when Joni arrives in her college room and discovers, after a hundred minutes of full-on bickering, a space devoid of antsiness. There are not only glancing moments but whole sequences in this movie when the agony of social embarrassment makes you want to haul the characters to their feet and slap them in the chops. Just watch Joni and Laser, who have told their mothers about Paul, bringing him home for a meal. I’m not sure which is more aghast, the look on his face when he is asked, “Did you always know you wanted to be in the food-services industry?” or the look on Nic’s face when she discovers that he dropped out of college. One of the reasons the women originally chose him is that he was meant to be studying international relations. Now, he says, “I’m a doer.” Oh, God.

All of this is made so much worse by everyone’s aching need to be holier, and hipper, than thou. The California that we get in this film is a greener, gayer update of the California that Woody Allen took such perfect potshots at, more than thirty years ago, in “Annie Hall,” the difference being that Cholodenko doesn’t always know that it is funny. She wants us to laugh at Paul’s initial response when he learns of the family setup (“I love lesbians!”), and she rightly notes the casual, bantering racism of the liberal bourgeoisie (listen to Jules address a Mexican gardener), but do the screenwriters not realize that half of the women’s conversation—“We just talked conceptually,” “It hasn’t risen to the point of consciousness for you,” “It’s so indigenous!”—is pure, extra-planetary prattling and nothing but? The prattle turns chronic when Jules, who fancies herself as a landscape designer, is hired by Paul to reshape his back yard; she suggests “a trellisy, hidden garden kind of thing,” or, alternatively, “you could go with the Asiany.” I wouldn’t trust her to pick a rose.
As anyone could have predicted, this new friendship soon becomes what Jules would call making-outy, as she and Paul put down their plants and retire to his boudoir. What Cholodenko, at her sneakiest, is doing here is to ask what occurs when a moral elasticity encounters sturdier, more traditional forms of living. Paul, for example, may only be a makeshift father figure, but under his influence Joni begins to stand up for herself against the brittle Nic, and Laser is inspired to drop an unsuitable friend—something that his mothers have long been urging him to do, without success. As for Jules, she gets laid by a man, which, if nothing else, makes a change, the problem being that the small, tolerant world of these prosperous folk can’t handle a change that extreme. Just as the California sunshine somehow loses its relaxing suffusion and hardens into a cruel noontide, so, by an irony that Cholodenko may not fully have intended, the climax of “The Kids Are All Right” grows suddenly humorless, and close to vengeful, in its moralizing glare. Danger shrinks back, and the kids are all right again, although you have to wonder who the real kids are: Joni and Laser, wise and wry, or their messed-up moms and feckless dad, who have so much more to learn?

© 2010 Condé Nast Digital

From The Guardian:

Getting a movie deal in Hollywood is only the beginning. Hammering out the details is when dreams and egos really collide

In Hollywood, the deal is king. Deals are how scripts get optioned, how stars and directors get signed up, how films make it to production. A good one can mean financial security and a name above the title. A bad one can be as dispiriting, gruelling and financially ruinous as building your dream house on unmarked floodland. The bad news is sometimes it's worse than that, and in the current financial climate it's getting tougher to make the right deal.

In these straitened times, George Clooney is allegedly settling for upfront fees of a paltry $2m, while Megan Fox has walked away from Transformers 3 because her salary demands "cannot be met". The most dramatic illustration of the difficulties Hollywood faces, though, comes in the plight of MGM – reportedly $3.7bn in debt – which has postponed production of the 23rd Bond film, despite it being part of the second most successful franchise of all time, after Harry Potter. MGM's much-anticipated co-production (with New Line) of The Hobbit is in similar disarray, with director Guillermo del Toro leaving the project last month, because his contract had only been for three years and he didn't fancy stretching it to infinity.

It isn't all doom and gloom for big-time dealmakers, though: the Potter films come to an end later this year, after generating fortunes for all concerned. (Prominent UK entertainment lawyer Reno Antoniades explains: "If you're doing Potter, there are no issues – the head of Warner Bros presses the green light and off you go.") And it's probable that the likes of James Cameron and Dark Knight director Christopher Nolan – who was handed $170m to enjoy relative artistic control on the forthcoming Leonardo DiCaprio blockbuster Inception – aren't feeling the chill wind either.

The trickiest deals for producers to hammer out are generally in the so-called "mid-price" market – lower-end Hollywood movies and aspirational indies seeking finance and distribution agreements. Ricky Gervais, who became his own producer with 2009's The Invention of Lying, says: "The more you need to court different people to get their money, the more they try to interfere." The story behind Mike Figgis's 1993 movie Mr Jones remains a salutary tale for aspirant dealmakers. Figgis still seethes at his treatment by producer Ray Stark: he says he was banned from the editing room and discovered people he thought were allies were also working for Stark."Finally I read my contract myself and discovered that what Ray Stark had told me – that he had the final cut – was not true," he says. When, in a meeting, he accused Stark ("Fuck you, Ray, you don't have final cut!"), it transpired that the head of the studio, who did have the rights, had delegated them – to Stark.

Andrew Eaton, the producer behind A Mighty Heart and 24 Hour Party People, says the most exasperating element of deal-making in Hollywood is the prevailing culture of obstruction. "A lot of people in business affairs think the last bit of power they have is to stop something happening. They take up time going over these ridiculous what-ifs: what if the ceiling collapses, what if there's a flood? It's just willy-waving. Similarly, agents don't like it if you speak directly to talent. I remember a producer friend of mine had an agent come up to him and say, 'You've shat in my mouth.' He meant the producer had talked to the client before he talked to the agent." He adds, darkly: "There are people in the business who consider the green-lighting of any project a failure."

Certainly, there are numerous stories of agents punishing producers for leaving the marked path. Stephen Woolley says he pitched the storyline of his 1986 thriller, Mona Lisa, to Sean Connery as they descended 28 floors in a lift. Connery loved the idea and told Woolley he wanted to do it. "So I called his agent, CAA, one of the biggest agencies in the world, and the assistant said: 'What do you mean Sean's read it? You mean you didn't come through us?' The agent himself refused to take my calls. That was it – doomed."

Even if you do get the star you want, reaching agreements on their dizzying array of demands can be wearisome. Apart from negotiating "back end" top-ups on stars' fees (anything from gross profit participation and image rights payments to awards bonuses), studios and producers have promised all sort of things to "quirky" actors, such as unlimited Montecristo cigars (Roger Moore), round-the-clock chauffeurs (Eddie Murphy), and a mysterious clause that Eaton was forced to offer – a guarantee to one actor that "no orifices" would be shown on screen.

Eaton admits the sheer slog of trying to close a deal in LA has occasionally broken down his defences to an embarrassing degree. "We did bad deals on The Claim with Pathe and MGM/UA. They kept asking for changes which meant all our fees were eaten up. I remember at the very last minute, 10 o'clock at night on Friday, when we thought the deal was finally done, someone from business affairs came into the room and said, 'No, actually, we want you to defer another chunk of your fees.' I can't remember the exact words I said but I know the last one was 'cunt'. Then I stormed out and burst into tears."

Of course, no matter who you are, a deal can go wrong, as John Travolta found out when he took half his usual $20m fee for 2000's Battlefield Earth, in favour of a $15m bonus if it took over $55m. It didn't. But if you're a wannabe producer whose hope has not entirely deserted, there are a few pointers that might come in handy.

One, tell the studio your script is "life-affirming". Apparently DreamWorks supremo Jeffrey Katzenberg begins pitch meetings by asking, "How is this movie life-affirming?" (Meaning, Basic Instinct writer Joe Eszterhas has said, "How will this movie make $100m?"). Two, don't fall out with a powerful lawyer (some say it's equally crucial not to upset any powerful Scientologists). Three, don't leave a deal before it's finished. According toWoolley, whose $63m-grossing The Crying Game aided Miramax's ascent to super-indie powerhouse status in the 90s: "It's all about timing, knowing the point when you've gone as far as you can with a distributor, where they are still in the contract zone and you can close the deal. You don't want them to sleep on it. My ex-partner Nik Powell would go to people's hotels and sleep outside their rooms until they came out for breakfast. That's how you close a deal."

For Gervais, the secret is simply to care more about your film than the money. When he was preparing The Invention of Lying, he says: "I went into every meeting with one great strength: I was always ready to walk away. I don't care if they say no and that makes me bulletproof. They don't know what to say when I say I don't care about the money. The room literally goes quiet. I don't think they think, 'Wow, what a man of integrity.' I think they're thinking, 'Wow, what a fucking idiot.'" Nevertheless, he says, the secret of good film-making is not worrying about the bottom line: "If you want to make a good film – try to make your film for £40."

It's all worked rather well so far for Gervais, who secured final edit on The Invention of Lying and had the film in the black before it was released, having kept the budget down and sold 50% of the film's equity (retaining the other half for himself) to a studio for more than it cost to make. But the new climate of film-making is hugely challenging for the mid-range film-maker working with a budget between $5m and $50m. Pre-sales – the industry practice of selling distribution rights before a film is actually made – are drying up, and the studios, fearful of the democratising properties of digital media, are pouring their energies into 3D, a process still beyond the financial realities of most non-studio film-makers.

According to Colin Vaines, a former executive vice-president in the European arm of Miramax and now a producer, it's increasingly important for a mid-budget film looking for finance to have an X Factor: a newsworthy headline-generator putting your film above the movie-fan parapet. For Vaines, currently producing Ralph Fiennes's directorial debut, Coriolanus, this comes in the shape of gossip-magnet Gerard Butler. For Eaton, it's Liam Gallagher, with whom he is working on the Beatles biopic The Longest Cocktail Party. Vaines's next project? A time-spliced love story, directed by Madonna. Harvey Weinstein sure taught him a few things.

Clause for concern: five classic movie deals to learn from
The first "morality" clause was implemented in 1921 when actor Fatty Arbuckle (below), was arrested for the manslaughter of a young actress. Arbuckle was found not guilty but a good behaviour clause is still common in Hollywood today.

In 1949, Jimmy Stewart became the first actor to be awarded profit participation. Universal-International, concerned about the upfront costs of Anthony Mann's ambitious western Winchester '73, struck a deal with Stewart's legendary agent, Lew Wasserman, to give Stewart half the profits instead of a large fee. In 1980, Paramount gave birth to the modern super-producer, when it granted George Lucas retained ownership of 50% of Raiders of the Lost Ark and control of every aspect of expenditure on the project, while assuming all risk and sacrificing a hefty share of revenues before recouping costs. The film needed to gross $42m before Paramount turned a profit. It grossed $242m.

Johnny Depp is set to become Hollywood's highest paid actor of all time, when he picks up his "guaranteed minimum" cheque for $35m for appearing in Pirates of the Caribbean 4. All in all, the Pirates movie franchise will net him at least $80m. Screenwriter Joe Eszterhas broke the record for a script fee, when he received $3m for his work on Basic Instinct (above, starring Sharon Stone and Michael Douglas), in 1990. The amount led to a meeting of studio heads to discuss ways of keeping script prices down. Eszterhas claims it took 13 days from idea to the script auction.

© Guardian News and Media Limited 2010