Three Toronto problems
I leave for the Toronto Film Festival in five days (I like getting there early), and I’ve just done a re-scan and there are at least five high-profile festival selections that are putting out mild distress signals. No torpedo holes, no manning the lifeboats, but expressions of concern on the captain’s face. It means dredging up old material and I hate that, but I can at least re-review the situation with three of them:
(a) Steven Zallian‘s All The King’s Men (Columbia, 9.22) — This Mike Medavoy- produced period political drama has been giving off sputtering noises since it was yanked almost a year ago from Sony’s late ’05 release schedule. I’m not implying it’s a bad or even half-bad film — it might be half-decent or even good — but Sony won’t pre-screen it and Medavoy won’t even pick up the phone which tells you there are feelings of uncertainty behind the palace gates. And Sean Penn‘s delivery of his Willie Stark speeches, shouted and bellowed with that cracker-barrel hick accent, exudes a kind of profound anti-charm. And Sony’s decision to open Men in late September rather than October or November hints at something also. Any way you cut it, Men is coming into the festival with a wounded rep;
(b) Emilio Estevez‘s Bobby (Weinstein Co., 11.17) — Estevez is a director who has demonstrated his chops three times before (Wisdom, Men at Work, Rated X), and I just don’t see this one working out all that well, especially with all the problems he had during production. That really funny Bobby story written last year for Esquire by screenplay polisher John Ridley includes a crew-member judgment that the script reads like “an episode of Love Boat ’68.” And then there’s that Bobby one-sheet, which uses three lines that Sen. Ted Kennedy spoke in his eulogy speech for his slain brother during the funeral service at St. Patrick’s Cathedral: “He saw wrong and tried to right it. He saw suffering and tried to heal it. He saw war and tried to stop it.” Bobby is not a biopic, and this ad copy therefore reeks of dishonesty. And there’s also that initial announcement that Bobby is going to be screened as a “work in progress”.
(c) Anthony Minghella‘s Breaking and Entering (Weinstein Co., 12.8) — The campfire talk a few weeks ago was that Harvey Weinstein was on the fence about Minghella’s film coming out this year. (Harvey changes his mind all the time, but still…) And an Oscar campaign stategist not employed by the Weinstein Co, told me a while back that the word on B & E was that it wasn’t quite Oscar-calibre. It now has a 12.8 platform release plan, but Weinstein has mulled bumping it into the winter or spring of ’07. Smell the air, do the math.
qui
I don’t have a clue about what Estevez has wrought with “Bobby”, but if I have to sit through that hyperkinetic trailer for ” All the King’s Men” one more time I will scream. Penn may be a great actor, but he has raised the bar for overacting to an insurmountable degree in the trailer. I hope to God his entire performance isn’t pitched to that ludicrous level of histrionics. Then again, Jeff, that’s how HItler swayed the German people, so if it worked for him, maybe Willie Stark is on to something here. What also worries me is that Jude Law looks like a passive cipher in the movie, when his character of Jack Burden is the narrator in the novel, which I recently re-read, by the way, and was once again knocked out by Robert Penn Warren’s brilliant and inciteful prose. Burden is the conscience of the book, and every character, including Willie Stark, is filtered through his gently cynical sensibility. This movie looks like a sledgehammer adaptation of a book that achieved its power with subtlety and nuance. I didn’t care at all for Zaillian’s adaptation of “A Civil Action” either. Travolta was all wrong to play Jan Schlictmann, and the book was far more gripping than the tepid film. I think Sony is indeed dumping it into a September release slot, hoping for something, but fully knowing it will be long forgotten in the wake of the true Oscar bait to follow it.
And I could not care less about Mingella’s “Breaking and Entering”. I absolutely hated what he did to “Cold Mountain”, a great book that was badly miscast, and directed with astounding wrong-headedness. It should have been an elegiac love story tempered with heart-wrenching bursts of violence. Jude Law tried valiantly to find the internalized soul of his character, Inman, but Kidman was a fatal choice to play Ada, and Minghella reduced the character of Ruby to stereotypical pluck and sass in Zellweger’s “Oscar-winning performance”. I felt NOTHING watching Minghella’s travesty. It had no feel for the South, and not just because he shot it in Romania. It would have been just as bad if he shot it in a Wall-Mart parking lot.
For my money, the film that is going to come out of Toronto smelling like an Oscar Rose is “Little Children”. I loved the book and that trailer is absolutley telling me that Todd Field has gotten everything, and I mean, EVERYHING, about the book, exactly right.
Paul, that’s a hard act to follow, I just want to say, I’m eagerly anticipating numbers 4 and 5 from Mr. Wells.
Paul, that’s a hard act to follow, I just want to say, I’m eagerly anticipating numbers 4 and 5 from Mr. Wells.
Hate to derail this topic, but…
http://viewaskew.com/theboard/viewtopic.php?p=1744859#1744859
Kevin…actually I’ve always thought Jeff looks an awful lot like a son of Robert Taylor, especially in the eyes. But the color of his hair is more like Susan Hayward’s. Ya think maybe Bob and Suzie had an on the set affair at some time?
When I first saw that image of our columnist, I thought it was Michael Parks, which confused me some.
Congratulations to Kevin Smith. The Edinburgh International Film Festival closed out its landmark 60th edition Saturday with Kevin Smith’s “Clerks II” winning the Standard Life Audience Award.
Congratulations to Kevin Smith. The Edinburgh International Film Festival closed out its landmark 60th edition Saturday with Kevin Smith’s “Clerks II” winning the Standard Life Audience Award.