Friday, May 04, 2007

THIS WEEK'S BRIEFING

  • Last night, I got an early look at Knocked Up (opens nationwide 6/1), the most anticipated comedy of the year for me, at least. Director Judd Apatow's follow-up to his smash-hit The 40 Year Old Virgin does not disappoint, and is in many ways like the last movie, which is a good thing. It features a perfectly cast ensemble, raucous humor, and an overall sweet story that will have widespread, cross-gender appeal throughout the summer. The choice of stars could easily have backfired, but ultimately proves prophetic. Seth Rogen, elevated from a supporting part in Virgin to unlikely leading man in this film, evokes memories of Animal House-era John Belushi in his portrayal of a carefree, fat, stoner, loser... who you can't help but like. Katherine Heigl, one of the stars of the hit ABC television show Grey's Anatomy, which is immensely popular with young women, plays the polar opposite sort, a driven, beautiful, hardworking woman... who you can't help but like. (The Devil Wears Prada star Anne Hathaway reportedly turned down Heigl's part, and her loss is our gain.) These two people, who could seemingly only be brought together by a drunken encounter, turn out to be a lot of fun to watch together. So, bottom line? If you liked The 40 Year Old Virgin, then you will like this. If you didn't, you won't. And if you haven't seen it, you deserve to be knocked up!
  • On a related note, I just saw a 2005 German film called Kebab Connection, a really funny dramedy about—you guessed it—a shlub of a guy who accidentally gets a beautiful girl pregnant. The film, directed by Anno Saul and starring Denis Moschitto and German MTV's Nora Tschirner (who really steals the show), is very different from Knocked Up in many respects, so a comparison is pointless. But suffice it to say that this film, too, is well worth a look, not only for pure escapism but also to get a sense of the promise of the burgeoning New-New German Cinema.
  • I just realized I never followed up with a report on my early look last month at a fairly rough-cut of S.O.P.: Standard Operating Procedure, the next documentary from Academy Award winner Errol Morris (Gates of Heaven, The Thin Blue Line, The Fog of War), which I saw with the director. Morris says he has a longstanding fascination with "iconic images," including the photo of the flag-raising at Iwo Jima that inspired Clint Eastwood's two films this past year (Flags of Our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima), and most recently the photos of the Abu Ghraib prison abuse scandal, which are the basis of this film. As always, Morris manages to get all the principle figures—Lynndie England, et al—to open up quite candidly about the roles they played in interviews that are made even creepier because they are shot using Morris' Interrotron camera, which enables interview subjects to look directly into the camera while answering his questions. The film also features slow-motion reenactments of several incidents, just as The Thin Blue Line did, as well as a first-rate, haunting musical score by Danny Elfman, rather than Morris' regular collaborator Philip Glass. Although I haven't seen every minute of the film—nobody has, because it's not yet complete—I can say that it appears to have the makeup of an Oscar nominee. Aside from an Oscar nod, there are two potentially controversial things to look for whenever the film is released, probably sometime next year: (1) This film, in its current form, includes previously unseen, tremendously graphic, and uncensored photographs and cell-phone videos from Abu Ghraib—prisoners being forced to masturbate, touch each other, etc. Morris indicated that he and distributor Sony Pictures Classics, which has given him his biggest budget and complete creative freedom thus far, hope the film will be given some leeway by the ratings board because it is a documentary, but acknowledges that if it does come back with an NC-17 rating, he would probably cut it until it was an R rather than release it to such a limited audience; and (2) Morris is not shy when it comes to expressing his opinions about the "pointlessness" of and "lives wasted" in Iraq... I 'get' where he's coming from, but those who disagree will likely attempt to cast him as a Michael Moore-type of extreme liberal and disparage the film. (On the other hand, he has deliberately kept President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney out of the film to keep the focus on the actual prisoner abuse, so perhaps he'll get a pass...)
  • Congratulations to the folks at the Independent Film Festival of Boston, who did a great job with this year's event. It brought hordes of talented indie filmmakers to the area, many of whom I met at a festival after-party last Saturday night at swanky Bar 10, located inside the Westin Copley Hotel. I didn't get to see as many films as I would have liked (I'm especially disappointed I missed Away from Her, which is generating Oscar buzz for Julie Christie), but I was duly impressed with the very positive response to the festival offerings and organization from the filmmakers themselves, including David Kaplan, the writer-director of the rotoscope-animated film Year of the Fish, which many were saying good things about. It was also good to see an old friend, Rich Stack (who, oddly enough, directed an award-winning movie called Year of the Bluefish), an alumnus of and now instructor at Boston University's Center for Digital Imaging Arts, who tells me he is now at work with Eddie Kent on a movie called The Aristocrat.
  • On a sad note, today would have been the great Audrey Hepburn's 78th birthday. Hepburn, who won the Best Actress Academy Award for her debut in Roman Holiday (1953) and was immortalized in Breakfast at Tiffany's (1961), died of colon cancer in 1993.
  • And, finally, a belated acknowledgment of the passing of two of the more colorful figures from the world of film. The first, Kitty Carlisle, who was best known in film circles for her role opposite the Marx Brothers in A Night at the Opera (1935) and everywhere else as the New York socialite who appeared for decades as a panelist on the game show To Tell the Truth, died of heart failure at the age of 96 on April 17. On a personal note, I interviewed Carlisle back on October 12, 2004 for my in-progress book about the history of American cinema, and I have to say it included one of the most awkward exchanges I can remember. Carlisle had been rather curt throughout the interview—which I suppose is understandable when you're 94—so, towards the end of the interview, I decided to throw her a softball question about something she enjoyed talking about. I knew she had just won a long fight to have her late husband, the great playwright Moss Hart, featured on a United States stamp, so I asked what I thought was a perfectly reasonable question, which prompted her to flip out. Here's how it went down:
    • Can you tell me a little about your husband?
    • [goes nuts] Who the hell are you?! You don't have any idea who he was? What kind of a book are you writing? I think that maybe I've been wasting my time.
    • No. With all due respect, I do know who he was—
    • Do you know who my husband was?!
    • I do know who your husband was. That's why I'm asking you to talk about him...
    • Who was he?
    • Your husband?
    • Yeah!
    • He was a playwright.
    • And what was his name?
    • Moss Hart!
    • [calms down] Yes. That's right. Well, he was very famous. And he wrote very good plays. And he didn't live long enough; he died at fifty-seven. And we didn't have enough time together.
    As you can imagine, I was not a big fan of Kitty Carlisle's, but I hope she and what's-his-name? (just kidding) are together again. The other passing was that of longtime Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) president Jack Valenti at the age of 85 on April 26 of complications from a stroke. Valenti was widely admired as a true patriot who worked as a loyal aide to President Lyndon B. Johnson following the assassination of President John F. Kennedy—he is visible at about ten o'clock in the famous shot of Johnson being sworn in aboard Air Force One—before accepting the role of Hollywood's top lobbyist in Washington, D.C. At the start of his reign as the head of the MPAA, which lasted from 1966 to 2004, Valenti recognized that the Production Code that had censored Hollywood films since 1932 was being disregarded as never before, and so he proactively replaced it with the MPAA Film Rating System (G, PG, R, NC-17, etc.) that exists in essentially the same form (PG-13 was later added) to this day. As chronicled in the recent Kirby Dick documentary This Film Is Not Yet Rated (2006), many filmmakers resent the vague and repressive standards of the MPAA ratings, which they feel restricts creativity. But even those who disliked Valenti's politics generally liked the charismatic, throwback of a man.
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