Day 3
America is a great sporting nation, but none of our grandest spectacles—the
World Series, the Super Bowl, that hot dog-eating contest in Coney Island on the
Fourth Of July, etc.—have the magnitude of the World Cup. World Cup fever
suffuses Iranian director Jafar Panahi’s Offside,
which is set nearly in real time around an Iran-Bahrain qualifying match that
could secure Iran’s place in Germany in 2006. Government policy dictates
that Iranian women are not allowed into stadiums (women from visiting countries
are exempt from such restrictions) and the film follows a group of young girls
who are caught trying to sneak in. Panahi makes a simple plea: What’s the
big fucking deal? It isn’t a surprising attitude from Panahi, whose The
Circle strung together a number of vignettes about female suffering under
repressive patriarchal law. Offside makes a far less strident—and,
in the end, quite joyful—argument that soccer (and the stirrings of national
pride and fervent passion that go along with it) should not be denied to anyone.
You know what else shouldn’t be denied to anyone? Hardcore, unsimulated
sex in theaters around the country. Shortbus,
John Cameron Mitchell’s liberated follow-up to Hedwig And The Angry
Inch, fulfills the long-tabled dream that adult films would gain some legitimacy
and permanence on American screens after the brief XXX craze in the ‘70s.
And I’m convinced that this movie could open the floodgates: The sex scenes
are full of acrobatics and “aberrant” couplings, yet I can’t
imagine the curious-minded fleeing the theater. And that’s not just because
the scenes are merely sexy, but because they’re real in other respects,
too; the characters are trying to find pleasure and sometimes love, but they don’t
always get there in conventional ways, if they even get there at all. Mitchell’s
actors are occasionally shaky and he has yet to develop a particularly fluid visual
style, but Shortbus feels like an adult movie for its time—which,
to quote the master of ceremonies at the underground sex club of the title, is
“like the ‘60s, but without the hope.”
During last year’s Oscar season, Sony made the odd decision to pull All
The King’s Men from the release schedule and retool it
for ’06. This obviously set off some alarm bells: Here’s a major project
based on one of the great American political yarns, with an all-star cast (Sean
Penn, Jude Law, Kate Winslet, James Gandolfini, Anthony Hopkins, et al.) and top
screenwriter Steven Zaillian at the helm. But Sony did something unusual: Rather
than just dump the thing in January or February, it held the film an entire year
and are now launching it at the start of Oscar season, which makes you wonder
if it was really a good film that simply wasn’t ready in time for December
’05. Um…no. This has to be the most stultifying prestige picture I’ve
seen in years; it just sits there like a dead fish that did all its flapping in
pre-production. It’s hard to identify what torpedoes the film most: A cast
that wrestles so mightily with their Louisiana accents that they lose grip over
the rest of their performances; the peculiar decision to follow Jude Law’s
weak-willed compromised journalist character instead of the charismatic Huey Long-type
played by Penn (who’s awful, but still); James Horner’s oppressive
percussion score (bum-bum-bum-bum-bum-bum….clang!); or the total lack of
narrative energy. These cacophonous elements come together like a middle-school
symphony.
The evening ended with Catch
A Fire, which I saw for review when it comes out in October;
I’ve save most of my thoughts for the review, but suffice to say, this continues
a futile tradition of white dudes commenting on the subject of apartheid. Liberal
earnestness doesn’t usually make for great art.
Day 4
Another four-movie day today and one planned tomorrow, too. I feel like such a
wuss, but those five or six-movie days take a toll physically that rarely pays
off in artistic enrichment. You hope that by packing the schedule, you’ll
get a chance to squeeze in that little discovery that nobody knows about yet,
but I’m content to follow my own instincts and buzz from reliable sources.
I’m lazy that way.
It helps to start things light. Christopher Guest’s comedy For
Your Consideration is a welcome break from the trio of mockumentaries
(Waiting For Guffman, Best In Show, A Mighty Wind),
but the troupe remains the same, as does Guest’s empathy for has-beens and
never-wases who are on the fringes of the business. Like Noel, I laughed frequently,
and also like Noel, I was left with an aftertaste as sour as a 500 milliliter
can of NutraSweet. The big problem here is that Guest isn’t just dealing
with fringe-dwellers, but that his satire is just as clueless as they are. The
Hollywood depicted in FYC isn’t even a halfway reasonable approximation
of the real thing; the film-within-a-film, Home For Purim, would never
get made and the other films competing for Oscars wouldn’t qualify for a
Daytime Emmy nomination. So what’s being satirized, exactly? There are plenty
of funny lines and performances here, though Guest made this same movie much better
when it was called The Big Picture.
Nearly 20 hours after seeing Little
Children, In The Bedroom director Todd Field’s
skillful adaptation of Tom Perrotta’s book, I still can’t get the
butterflies out of my stomach and I’m not sure that’s a good thing
or not. Having read every other Perrotta book but this one, the material doesn’t
seem to play to his strengths for low-key observational humor; many of the peripheral
characters seem to fall into familiar suburban types—specifically, uptight
housewives who fret over their kids. The film follows two narrative strands—one
about a dissatisfied intellectual mother (Kate Winslet) who’s drawn to a
handsome Mr. Mom type, and the other about a registered sex offender who’s
monitored so closely by his neighbors that he’s basically under house arrest.
Each of these strands is developed with exceptional care and a writerly attention
to detail that it makes the film far more vivid than the usual story of suburban
rot. And yet when the inevitability that they’ll come together at some point
down the line is the Sword Of Damocles that hangs over the whole movie and I’m
not sure they collide in a way that really justifies the unsettling children-in-peril
scenario. That said, Field confirms his considerable gifts behind the camera and
the film gets an extraordinary performance from Jackie Earle Haley as the sex
offender; you might remember Haley as Kelly in Bad News Bears, but he’s
grown into a gaunt figure who projects both vulnerability and terrifying menace
here.
Every few days in a festival, you hit a wall. For me, that wall was Benoit Jacquot’s The Untouchable. I made it through about half an
hour of the film—an extremely disappointing half-hour from a director who
I used to admire more in the past than now—and then, zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.
I’ll refrain from any official damnation of the film, but it’s at
least partially Jacquot’s fault that his movie played Mr. Sandman.
There was no chance of sleeping through I
Don’t Want To Sleep Alone, the latest from one of my favorite
directors Tsai Ming-liang (What Time Is It There?, Goodbye, Dragon
Inn), though he unfortunately provides the uninitiated with a chance to do
so. Many of the recognizable Tsai hallmarks are present—long, beautifully
composed master shots; urban characters whose lives are suffused with loneliness
and longing; the symbolic presence of water everywhere; etc.—but the first
80 minutes or so feels like a disappointingly static retread of Vive L’Amour.
Then smoke from a huge fire drifts into the frame and the film becomes an exceptionally
poignant look at suffocating characters reaching out desperately to the object
of their affection. This is probably Tsai’s weakest film to date—what
I really missed was his deadpan sense of humor, which at its best makes him a
natural successor to silent (or near-silent) filmmakers like Buster Keaton or
Jacques Tati—but it ends beautifully and that helps a lot.