September, 2006
ROCKY MOUNTAIN MOVIE MECCA
Every Labor Day weekend, the town of Telluride, Colorado is the setting for the most exhilarating film festival in the country. This year, its 33rd, was no exception. Over the course of four jam-packed days movie-lovers are presented with a dizzying selection of contemporary world cinema, along with in-person tributes and archival gems. I don’t know of another festival that embraces so many facets of cinema, from a pioneering 1919 Australian silent film to a tribute to Penelope Cruz.
Faced with so many frustrating choices I try to strike a balance between the newer titles—many of which will be playing in theaters this season, although without the presence of their filmmakers—and revivals.
The Aussie silent is in fact the cornerstone of that country's film heritage. The Sentimental Bloke was a hit in 1919, in part because it was based on a hugely popular epic poem, about a ne'er-do-well who changes his ways when he falls in love. It was presented with charming musical accompaniment by Jen Anderson and the Larrikins. (I enjoyed it so much I purchased a CD, which you can find at the Head Records website here.) The film has existed in less-than-perfect form for many years, but the serendipitous discovery of a 35mm nitrate print at the George Eastman House made it possible to piece together a longer, better-looking version than anyone had seen since the movie’s original release.
How can an ancient film with an utterly simple story, told in almost indecipherable Aussie slang, have such charm and potency for a modern-day audience? I can’t easily answer that question, but I can tell you that an audience of 500 cheered The Sentimental Bloke in Telluride.
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At the other end of the spectrum, I was blown away by Pedro Almodóvar’s latest drama, Volver, which gives Penelope Cruz a starring role much richer than any she’s had before. No wonder festival co-director Bill Pence was persuaded that this was the moment to honor the actress. Volver is a magical Almodóvar brew of Spanish culture, incorporating sex, superstition, ghosts, family bonds and family skeletons. The writer-director cast Cruz as a matriarch in the tradition of Sophia Loren in her earth-mother period, and even includes a film clip from Luchino Visconti’s Bellissima featuring the ultimate earth mother, Anna Magnani.
Other guests included the celebrated editor and sound designer Walter Murch, who regaled the audience with stories (illustrated by telling film clips) of “saving” Nino Rota’s score for The Godfather and restoring Orson Welles’ Touch of Evil. Murch also revealed that when he read Francis Coppola’s script of The Conversation, he remembered flushing some embarrassing magazines down the toilet to hide them from his parents, only to have them float to the surface. He suggested incorporating that idea into a key scene in the film with Gene Hackman, and Coppola did just that.
Michael Korda, a legend in the world of publishing, came to Telluride to talk about his legendary uncle Alexander Korda, his father Vincent (who served as art director on all the great London Films including The Thief of Bagdad) and his uncle Zoltan, who directed such classics as The Four Feathers—in spite of the fact that he intensely disliked the British Empire! (At the end of his career, Michael explained, he finally got to make a film that expressed his true feelings about political oppression, Cry, The Beloved Country.)
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Many of the films that people will be talking about the most this fall were on display at Telluride, including Kevin Macdonald’s The Last King of Scotland, with a riveting performance by Forest Whitaker as Idi Amin, Todd Field’s remarkable Little Children, John Scheinfeld and David Leaf’s The U.S. vs. John Lennon, Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Babel, Steven Shainberg’s Fur, with Nicole Kidman as Diane Arbus, Mira Nair’s The Namesake, Douglas McGrath’s Infamous, Ray Lawrence’s Jindabyne, starring Gabriel Byrne and Telluride resident Laura Linney, and Roger Michell’s Venus, written by Hanif Kureishi and featuring a performance by Peter O’Toole that many people think is an Oscar shoo-in.
As seems to be the case every year, almost all of these films are serious—incredibly serious, often emotionally draining. Yet one of the films that made me cry gave me enormous satisfaction at the same time: it’s Peter Bogdanovich’s complete revision of his 1971 documentary Directed by John Ford. All of that film’s key ingredients are intact, including Orson Welles’ narration, John Ford’s cantankerous interview at Monument Valley , and thoroughly engaging interviews (now more precious than ever) with John Wayne, Henry Fonda, and James Stewart. Bogdanovich has expanded his film and broadened his canvas, with more excerpts and newly-shot interviews with Steven Spielberg (who tells a great story about meeting Ford), Martin Scorsese, Walter Hill, Clint Eastwood, and the keeper of the flame, Harry Carey, Jr. This exceptional documentary about a most contradictory man (and artist) will play on Turner Classic Movies later this year; don’t miss it.
I’m just skimming the surface of Telluride’s bill of fare for 2006. At a party on Sunday night everyone was buzzing about a new German film called The Lives of Others that I didn’t get to see. Now I can hardly wait; it’s not due until February of next year, but it’s likely to be Germany ’s candidate for Best Foreign Language Film in the upcoming Oscar race.
The great good feelings of being in one of the country’s beauty spots, surrounded by interesting and friendly people, attending one of the world’s best-run film festivals was tempered by the surprise announcement that Festival founders and co-directors Bill and Stella Pence are retiring. They had talked about this before but got a second wind and continued to steer their “baby,” along with co-founder Tom Luddy, past the 25th anniversary when they thought they might bow out.
Now they have made their decision, and on a personal basis I applaud them: they’ve given so much of themselves to this festival that I’m sure it’s kept them from doing many other things they’d like to do. They’ve earned some private time.
Fortunately, Luddy is staying, and he’s being joined by Gary Meyer, co-founder of Landmark Theaters and one of the savviest film people I know. Gary and Tom will continue to draw on the talent and energy of the enormous staff that makes the Festival run, but they’ll still have their work cut out for them. Any festival entails endless details, from seeing that prints of films arrive on time to ensuring proper accommodations for visitors from all over the world.
They have a lot to live up to, but they also have the support of everyone who loves this festival and the town that hosts it.
(For more of my Telluride snapshots, click here.)
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TO QUOTE OR NOT TO QUOTE
If you want sound moviegoing advice, there are many sources you can consult, from your fellow students or office-mates to your favorite film critic. Or you can go to chud.com and joblo.com. Full-page newspaper ads proclaiming Talladega Nights to be “the funniest movie of the year” were attributed to someone at chud.com, while The Descent was deemed “the scariest movie since Alien” by joblo.com, even on the one-sheet posters.
Let me get this straight: even as the studios are bad-mouthing critics as being irrelevant (which is ostensibly the reason they didn’t screen Snakes on a Plane or The Wicker Man for reviewers) they still feel that every film needs validation from someone—anyone—in their ads. I smell hypocrisy in the air.
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On another note, I’ve written before about the fact that I don’t leave a theater until the movie is finished—in other words, at the very end of the credits, after I’ve been threatened with civil and criminal prosecution. By that time my wife and I are often alone in the auditorium.
By that reckoning, millions of people didn’t see the closing gag in Will Ferrell’s Talladega Nights. I can’t say I loved that movie—I find Ferrell to be a one-note comedian—but there’s an amusing and surprisingly cerebral coda at the very end of the film involving actress Jane Lynch and the boys who play Ferrell’s sons.
Every year, a handful of directors decide to give their audiences a little something extra—almost a thank-you for wading through five to ten minutes of closing credits. And by the time those often very clever postscripts hit the screen, most of the moviegoers are already firing up their cars in the parking lot. It’s their loss.
While I’m in a fist-shaking mode let me register one more complaint, with more of a sigh than a shout. It has to do with people I love, namely actors. People have always paid their money to see stars, but without character actors and supporting players movies wouldn’t be the same. The estimable Pat Hingle has a tiny role in Talladega Nights as Greg Germann’s father; his screen time is so brief I wonder if there weren’t additional scenes that were cut for time. Otherwise, why bother hiring a man of his credits for a bit part?
Nevertheless, this veteran stage and screen actor (perhaps most familiar to modern-day audiences as Commissioner Gordon in the first four modern-era Batman movies) does appear in this summer hit. But you’d never know it from reading the cast lists printed alongside reviews in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, or any number of other sources. Only the trade papers, Variety and The Hollywood Reporter, made mention of his presence.
Another solid character actor, much younger than Mr. Hingle (who’s now 82), appears in a small role in Idlewild and doesn’t even receive billing in the opening credits. Perhaps Bill Nunn saw the film and chose to keep a low profile! But this actor, whose credits range from Do the Right Thing to Spider-Man is another of the also-rans whose lot as a character man is to be taken for granted.
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In a rare bit of corporate synergy, AOL (which is part of Time Warner, which in turn owns the MGM library) has decided to start running vintage Our Gang comedies on its service. Simply go to aol.com/in2TV and, amazingly enough, you can watch one-reelers from 1938 and 1939 on your computer screen.
That’s the good news. The bad news is that these are not the Hal Roach-produced shorts that everyone knows and loves; they’re the later entries in the series that were produced after Mr. Roach sold off the series (and the contracts of its young stars) to Metro. The earliest efforts still retain much of the sparkle and charm of the Little Rascals, with Spanky, Alfalfa, Darla, Buckwheat, Porky, and Butch doing what comes naturally. It was later that MGM—never a studio with much respect for slapstick comedy—turned the shorts into little morality plays and introduced new characters like Mickey, played by little Mickey Gubitosi (later known as Robert Blake).
I regret that the people who control the Hal Roach Our Gang shorts have effectively kept them off television for some twenty-five years, hoping someone would want to show their colorized versions of the originals... and that Hallmark Entertainment, which controls the home video rights, has ignored all the hard work we put into the VHS releases of the 1990s and parceled out only a handful of the shorts on DVD.
But for now, you can get at least a sampling of Spanky and friends online, and that’s better than nothing.
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If you were among the lucky movie nuts who attended Jeff Joseph’s World 3-D Festival two years ago you won’t want to miss the encore presentation beginning September 8 at the Egyptian Theater in Hollywood. I’ll be there for opening night, interviewing the stars of Those Redheads from Seattle, a Paramount musical that hasn’t been seen in 3-D since 1953! Jeff and his cohorts have put together another jam-packed calendar with encore presentations of old favorites and a surprising number of newly-discovered short subjects, cartoons, and feature films. For more information go to http://www.3dfilmfest.com.
