Category: Cinema

It’s Oh So Quiet.

Still catching up with my Oscar slate, and last night’s foray was Phillip Noyce’s remake of The Quiet American. All in all, very well done, and a battered, despairing Michael Caine deserves an Oscar for this much more than he ever did for his turn in the schlocky Cider House Rules. (As I said last week, though, the Best Actor field this year is very, very strong, and I still think Day-Lewis has the edge – having not yet seen any of the movies featuring Best Actress nominees, I can’t really comment on the women.) Brendan Fraser is also quite good, and the political dimension of the story (i.e. America’s involvement in sponsoring Vietnamese terrorism) is very well-integrated with the dramatic tale being told. If anything, the film slipped in the ratings to the right only because (a) The Pianist was better, or at least more powerful, (b) I found this film a bit slow in the first hour, partly because the tale begins at the end with the death of the “quiet” American (not much of a spoiler – it’s almost the first shot in the film), and thus much of the dramatic tension in the story has already been siphoned off, and (c) the “Vietnam is a woman” allegory is a bit heavy-handed – the audience can pick up on what’s going on without it being stated over and over again. But it’s worth seeing, and Michael Caine is magnificent.

Rising from a Ring of Fire.

While Todd Haynes works on getting his Bob Dylan biopic off the ground, MTV has a scoop about the Man In Black: Joaquin Phoenix and Reese Witherspoon will play Johnny Cash and June Carter respectively in the forthcoming Walk the Line, to be directed by Girl, Interrupted‘s James Mangold. I’ll give it a chance, for the subject matter if nothing else.

Schindler’s Liszt.

Caught Roman Polanski’s The Pianist Wednesday night and quite liked it, although as you might expect it’s pretty grueling – I’m not sure if I’d watch it again anytime soon. The first half plays out as a well-done and unflinching (non-Spielbergized) look at life and death in the Warsaw ghetto. (Watching Adrien Brody step over the bodies of starved children on his way to work, I was briefly reminded again of how unbelievably unrealistic and offensive I found Roberto Benigni’s Life is Beautiful.) As powerful as this first hour is, though, it can’t help but follow some of the conventions we’ve come to expect from films in the Holocaust genre – the Szpilmans keep saying things like, “Well at least we know this is as bad as it’s going to get,” while the audience knows full well it’s about to get much much worse. So, despite the unspeakable horrors on screen and the often-riveting performances throughout, we keep waiting for the other shoe to drop.

The second half, however, is a different story. When through a combination of luck and timely aid Szpilman finally manages to escape the ghetto, the film enters (at least to me) novel territory and becomes a strangely riveting and unfamiliar survival story, wherein a deteriorating Adrien Brody, moving from apartment to apartment and constantly scrounging for food and warmth, tries to wait out the end of the conflict. This part of The Pianist moves at a strange, languid pace and feels very unfilmlike, until a twist at the end that, although it may be true, still brings us back onto the well-trod path of filmic convention.

I doubt The Pianist will win any major Oscars, not only so the Academy can dodge the Polanski child molester bullet but also because Adrien Brody, who is undoubtedly excellent, plays Szpilman so maddeningly remote. We spend a lot of time with Brody in this film, and never once do we get the sense that we know what’s going on in his head, which I suppose is part of the point. At any rate, I can’t see the Academy rewarding this kind of understatement over a scenery-chewing performance like that of Daniel Day-Lewis, who carries Gangs of New York over at the other acting extreme. Nevertheless, The Pianist is a film worth seeing, if you have the stamina for it.

Grimm Amusements.

Terry Gilliam fans take heart: Although Don Quixote may be dead and buried, it looks like The Brothers Grimm has now secured funding from a parnership of MGM and Dimension. The film currently stars Heath Ledger and Matt Damon as the eponymous brothers, with Robin Williams and Jonathan “Sam Lowry” Pryce as the villains. Dimension, the senior partner, has a pretty lousy track record with regard to burying films they don’t have control over (Re: Existenz and Below), but hopefully Gilliam can buck the curse this time around.

Smaug Awakens 12.19.06

The site’s getting killed at the moment, but at some point this fan-made teaser for Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit is definitely worth checking out. Brought a smile to my face. In loosely related news, the second Animatrix trailer is also up – not half as intriguing as the first installment, but worth a look if you’re at all into anime (which, frankly, I’m not).

Bad news and Good news.

Harry finds out directly from PJ what’s been holding up the rumored Return of the King trailer. Says M. Jackson, We’re not doing a ROTK trailer for the end of Two Towers like we did last year. The reason is that the TT extended DVD has been so complex this year, it would have taken too many resources away from trying to get that finished. The FOTR extended cut had 35 extra CG shots – the TT extended cut has over 150.” Ah well. The waiting is the hardest part, but at least it sounds like more Ents and more Gollum are in our future.