After a long battle with Alzheimer's disease, the great movie star Charlton Heston has died. He was never the best actor (although his Oscar for 1959's "Ben Hur" says otherwise) but he was something the movies hadn't seen before: a flamboyantly macho man with an amazing flair for the melodramatic. If Bette Davis had been born a strapping outdoorsman from Michigan, she would have been Heston. It didn't matter whether he was playing Moses, John the Baptist, Michelangelo, El Cid or the last man on Earth, he was always Chuck - this sexy, intimidating American with a surprise righteous streak.
Gregory Peck and Spencer Tracy had their crusader moments, but Heston was the movie's freedom fighter. He and Sidney Poitier were two of the great moral stars - the force of their conviction could be shaming. Heston, too, was a Civil Rights man, having called Martin Luther King a "20th century Moses" and walking with the reverend in 1963's march on Washington. His admiration for King was evident in his acting. At both his best and his most shameless, he was a preacher, railing against this injustice or that. What made him such a surprise to watch, especially when he was sermonizing - and the screenwriters never seemed to run out of things for him to sermonize about - what made him an entertainer was the bang he gave the preaching. Heston succeeded at playing these courageous, imposing, appalled, beleaguered, almost classically handsome men (too much forehead, too many teeth) by overplaying them. This manly man's secret weapon was his histrionics -- it was camp. Even at his most ridiculous, Heston was hard to resist.
His lugubrious outrage distinguished him from the Gregory Pecks, John Waynes, Glenn Fords, and later the Clint Eastwoods and Arnold Schwarzeneggers. Heston needed to raise his voice. And, oh, the things would that come out of his mouth. He was the most reliably quotable movie star - every line finished with a exclamation point. He even became the face of the NRA like it was another of his Hollywood parts.
"Repent!!" -- "The Greatest Story Ever Told," 1965
"You did it! You cut up his brain, you bloody baboon!" -- "Planet of the Apes," 1968
"It's people. Soylent Green is made out of people. They're making our food out of people. Next thing they'll be breeding us like cattle for food. You've gotta tell them.
You've gotta tell them!" -- "Soylent Green," 1973
"Climb baby, climb!" -- "Airport 1975," 1975
One of Heston's favorite of his own performances was the ranch hand he played in "Will Penny" (1968), a so-so Western that let him do a little romance and little comedy and enter John Wayne territory. But he'd already out-Wayned Wayne -- with a kind of subtlety, too -- three years earlier with the title part in "Major Dundee," Sam Peckinpah's very good revisionist calvary western, whose production Heston gallantly fought to keep alive. He also used his cachet to get Orson Welles hired to make "Touch of Evil," where Heston gave my favorite of his performances. He played a Mexican narcotics detective looking for his girlfriend, Janet Leigh. The part should have been a joke, but Heston played it straight. This was a slim, tight deliberate piece of acting. Welles gave him a style to keep, and Heston played within its bounds. Not even that mustache could upstage him. He was sexy here. He was under control, even as the world appeared to be spinning in the opposite direction.
As the Hollywood production paradigm shifted from biblical-historical epics to post-biblical ahistorical disaster pictures, there he was as peeved as ever. By the 1970s, the world he was trying to preserve, better, or overcome in the 1950s and 1960s had collapsed on itself. The people he was trying to save or set free were gone. At the end of the end of everything, it was alway just Chuck. And somehow that seemed fine.
If you want a shake-your-bootiethang classic rock experience, courtesy of Mr. Martin Scorsese: "Shine a Light" (And if you really want your dentures rattling, see it on an IMAX screen).
If you have to see every movie George Clooney or Renee Zellweger make, no matter how tame: "Leatherheads"
If you're so charged up by that that you just have to keep going: The Brattle's unmissable "Schlock Around the Clock" program on Saturday. ("Poor White Trash" alert!)
No sooner do I write an adulatory post about George Clooney than I come upon this story about the trouble he's been having with the Writers' Guild of America over credit for the Leatherheads screenplay. He's so upset at the way he's been treated that he's gone "financial core" at the Guild, which is an irreversible decision making him a limited, non-voting, dues-paying member. He says he would have quit altogether, but that would have basically prevented him from working as a screenwriter in Hollywood.
According to Clooney, the original Leatherheads script by Duncan Brantley and Rick Reilly had been bouncing around for almost two decades before he took it, rewrote it as a screwball comedy, and got the project greenlit. He believes that he wrote all but two scenes of the resulting film. But when the credit squabble went to arbitration before the WGA last fall, the guild determined that Clooney didn't deserve screen credit for his work. That was the end of the line for him (he declined to appeal), though he kept the matter quiet at the time because of the ongoing writers strike.
Yesterday, Monika asked if we were tired of George Clooney, who has undeniably been everywhere since making his escape from ER in the mid-1990s. I wanted to weigh in, because my answer is a curious one, and it sadly wasn't an option in Monika's poll: I used to be tired of him, but I'm not anymore.
I think the peak of my tiredness came with the dreadful Perfect Storm in 2000. I remember being so sick of seeing Clooney pop up as these boring, poker-faced, tediously noble action heroes. I hadn't seen his earlier B-movie efforts at the time, and the triple-threat of Batman & Robin, The Peacemaker and The Perfect Storm made me wish he'd never been born. (I had seen Three Kings, and honestly don't remember why that didn't change matters for me -- I think I wrote it off as a fluke, and was more impressed with Ice Cube anyhow.) What an anodyne heartthrob, I thought, with no personality or real talent. Get him out of my sight.
It's old news that times are tight for professional movie critics at magazines and newspapers -- which means the Times got around to reporting it on Tuesday. More chilling is this list of critics who've left or been pushed from their jobs in the last two years.
Ahh, why should you care? Aren't movie reviewers -- those elitist thumbsuckers who dare to tell you what to think about "Alvin and the Chipmunks" -- an eminently disposable part of a troubled medium?
Sorry, no. I don't trust the IMDb user comments or Ain't It Cool News to point me to movies the studios aren't marketing down my throat, or give me a handle on how to consider the ones they are. I look, or looked, to Kevin Thomas, Jami Bernard, Michael Atkinson, Eleanor Ringel, Nathan Lee, and David Ansen. It's called informed context, and anybody who can provide it in our hoarse, hectoring 24/7 media culture should be trusted and prized, not shown the door.
Some, like Bernard, are reinventing themselves on the web, and of course the irony is that the readership for a film critic is now global rather than regional. I get emails from around the world; 10 years ago I'd just be hearing from that cranky guy in Everett. You'd think the media moguls, for all their talk about bringing the newspaper into the 21st century, would figure out a way to leverage that.
IMDB list ‘biography’ and ‘drama’ as the genres for this movie, but this definitely one of the better comedies I’ve seen in a long while. I was expecting a pretty serious political movie, but this story is so absurd it would have been funny even without all the great jokes this movie has to offer. And considering how this movie is based on a true story which has had some pretty serious effects on recent history, one can only conclude that this is an interesting movie in every sense of the word. (more…)
You've no doubt seen the ad campaign for Forgetting Sarah Marshallby now. Instead of a traditional poster, cities across the country have been littered with all-white signs that read (in black lettering), "You Suck Sarah Marshall" or "My Mom Always Hated You Sarah Marshall." Naturally, those not "in the know" may think these signs are a personal attack on one Sarah Marshall, who, in reality, is played by the adorable Kristen Bell in the film. Well, it's happened. Like, a lot.
According to The Daily News, a bunch of women from New York City -- who also happened to be named Sarah Marshall -- are definitely feeling the heat from this ad campaign. One girl actually got a phone call from her ex saying, "I don't know who's doing this, but it's not me." One ad which reads, "You DO look fat in those jeans Sarah Marshall" has some women signing up for gym classes, and applying extra make-up in the morning. Another Sarah Marshall says, "You see ... words like 'hate' and 'suck' with your name over and over again. It just doesn't feel pleasant inside." It does seem, though, that the younger the Sarah Marshall, the better. One girl who's 27 says her fourth-grade class constantly ask for her autograph.
What do you think about the ad campaign? And if you're a Sarah Marshall, definitely chime in below. Forgetting Sarah Marshall (which happens to be one helluva funny flick) hits theaters on April 18.
When I saw the blackjack drama 21at South By Southwest, I was instantly struck by its major flaws: It's full of clichés, and its supposedly brilliant main characters do a lot of stupid things. I had no idea I was missing another flaw, too -- that most of the real-life people who pulled off the scheme were Asian-American, while almost everyone in the movie is white.
People commenting on my review of the film mentioned this fact, and some subsequent Internet browsing confirms that it's been a hot topic among some observers ever since the film was announced. (I confess not having paid the film any attention until the marketing campaign kicked into high gear around the first of the year.) The character played by Jim Sturgess in the movie was named Jeff Ma in real life, and he and most of his teammates were Asian. In the movie, only two minor characters are still Asian, played by Aaron Yoo and Liza Lapira.
So the question is: Is the ethnicity-swapping the result of racism? Is it something else? Does it matter?
What a splendidly strange career Jules Dassin (above, in the striped shirt) had. The son of a Jewish immigrant barber in Middletown, CT, he acted in Yiddish theater in Manhattan in the 1930s, was assisting Alfred Hitchcock in Hollywood in 1941, directed his first feature, "Nazi Agent," the next year, landed on the HUAC blacklist in 1950, moved to France and won Best Director at Cannes with "Rififi" in 1955, met and married the larger-than-life Greek actress/activist/stateswoman Melina Mercouri in the mid-1960s (directing her in six films over the subsequent years), fled Greece in 1970 under threats from the ruling junta, returned four years later covered in glory, and lived out his final days running the Melina Mercouri Foundation, dedicated to returning the Elgin Marbles to Greece. He died yesterday at 96. The country's Prime Minister praised him as "a first-generation Greek."
That's a hell of a long way from Middletown, CT.
Then there are the movies. Dassin was most celebrated (and imitated) for the silent heist sequence in "Rififi" and the much-loved, rather too cute "Never On Sunday" (1960), with Mercouri as an earthy hooker and Dassin himself as the American nerd who tries to reform her. Before the witch-hunt chased him out of Hollywood, though, the director was a key architect of post-WWII film noir. "The Naked City" (1948), a police procedural filmed almost as if it were a documentary, was a breakthrough in its use of realistic New York City locations, and "Brute Force" (1947) applied the noir template to the prison film genre, with a young, hard-bitten Burt Lancaster as an anti-hero con and Hume Cronyn as a sadistic guard. (Hume Cronyn! As they say in "Juno," I didn't know he had it in him.)
"Night and the City" (1948) may be the best thing Dassin ever did, though -- a weird, jagged London-set thriller featuring Richard Widmark as an increasingly desperate small-time hustler named Harry Fabian. At times "Night" plays like the last film on earth, and to the director that's probably what it felt like; he was condemned in absentia by HUAC and didn't return to Hollywood for 20 years. I praised "Night and the City" just last week when Widmark died. Now Dassin has left us. I do hope Googie Withers is feeling in the pink.
I couldn't find the "Rififi" robbery scene online, but here's a nice little snippet from the film to give you a taste of what Dassin could do. Sorry, no subtitles. None are needed, really.
One of the hotter sales at this year's Sundance Film Festival was a documentary called Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired(check out our review here). The doc, which chronicles the director's controversial rape case throughout the years, was sold to HBO Documentary Films for $1 million following the fest. Okay, so one sees that HBO picked it up -- figuring it's a documentary, they'd probably go straight to cable and DVD with it, right? Yes. Right. HBO is premiering the film on June 9. Ah, but they'd also like the film to qualify for an Oscar, which means it needs to play in a theater for a minimum of seven days in Los Angeles county and Manhattan. The problem with this rule is that it can play ANYWHERE and HBO is certainly taking advantage of that.
Defamer points out, via some random newspaper ad they were sent (see above), that Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired is currently playing in one Manhattan theater on West 181st street. Yeah, that was 181st street, not 18th street. No typo. Two afternoon screenings per day. Bet you didn't know about that one, huh? I don't blame you -- who the f*ck in their right mind WOULD know about that!? I don't know much about Los Angeles County, but apparently the same crap is being pulled there (two afternoon screenings at a theater called Laemmle's One Pasadena).
So why does HBO do this? If they have to screen it theatrically in order for it to be in the running for an Oscar, why don't they screen it at a reputable indie-centric theater in NYC, like Film Forum or the IFC Center. Sh*t, screen it at my apartment -- I bet more people would see it at my crib than on West 181st street.
No sooner do I write an 
Yesterday, Monika 
You've no doubt seen the 
When I saw the blackjack drama 
