Observation of the week

Soap operas are a world where rich people always have chandeliers and hip people have striped hair and the language that they use doesn’t have any flexibility anymore.

Bronson Pinchot, interviewed in The Onion. In the same interview, this exchange:

Did you have a sense that even though Tom Cruise was boring and unpleasant, he would be exciting onscreen?
Oh, no. I thought the movie [Risky Business] would disappear. It just goes to show you, I obviously don’t have the antennae for that. I didn’t see it at all, but neither did any of the actors. All of the actors who talked about him were like, “What is this guy all about?” And you know, honestly, I never got it, and I don’t get it to this day. But it was his breakout film. He always talked about himself like he was a mega-superstar; that was weird, too.

In other Tom Cruise news, Christian Bale based his Patrick Bateman on the Cruise he saw interviewed on TV, according to American Psycho director Mary Harron. From Black Book:

We talked about how Martian-like Patrick Bateman was, how he was looking at the world like somebody from another planet, watching what people did and trying to work out the right way to behave. And then one day he called me and he had been watching Tom Cruise on David Letterman, and he just had this very intense friendliness with nothing behind the eyes, and he was really taken with this energy.

Or, as the Bateman voice-over puts it:

There is an idea of a Patrick Bateman; some kind of abstraction. But there is no real me: only an entity, something illusory. And though I can hide my cold gaze, and you can shake my hand and feel flesh gripping yours and maybe you can even sense our lifestyles are probably comparable ... I simply am not there.

Four from October, and 25 films you will never be able to enjoy again

FOUR FROM OCTOBER

Up (Pete Docter, 2009): The married-life montage is extraordinary -- and moving. Everything else in Pixar's Americanised Miyazaki outing is just -- no contradiction -- predictably spectacular.

Summer of Sam (Spike Lee, 1999): The Scorsese film Scorsese never made. Or Saturday Night Fever meets Seven in the imagination of Travis Bickle. But no amount of art-directed 70s sleaze and urban dread can ever be as pungent as the real thing.

Strayed (Andre Techine, 2003): Making the nature scene. A French idyll on the edge of WWII. Emmanuelle Beart you know about. Gaspard Ulliel? He looks like he walked out of a Pierre et Giles shoot. How apt that he's soon the gay angel in The Vintner's Luck (but just how gay and how much space he and his theology will get is a discussion that apprehensive Vintner's fans are having somewhere else).

Proof (John Madden, 2005): David Auburn's maths play about that slippery border between genius and insanity gets skilfully adapted by the author for John Madden -- but then, I've never read or seen the actual play, so who knows? Anyway, why do I feel like I've never seen a Gwyneth Paltrow performance as good as this before? And less is thankfully more for mad dad Anthony Hopkins. But can you buy Jake Gyllenhaal as a maths prodigy and rock drummer? Darko excepted, have you ever bought him as anything?

25 FILMS YOU WILL NEVER BE ABLE TO ENJOY AGAIN
This is oldish -- from February 2009 -- but I only just came across it. The arch-conservative National Review has its list of 25 best conservative movies. You expected Red Dawn, Forrest Gump, maybe even Whit Stillman's Metropolitan ("He brings us to see what is admirable and necessary in the customs and conventions of America’s upper class"), the Christian allegories of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and the enduring fantasy that Lord of the Rings is somehow prophetic of and applicable to America's mood post-9/11. You also expected that they would read The Dark Knight as an analogy of illegal tactics in the war on terror (but not as a critique of said tactics) and love every minute of United 93. Surprise entry: Team America: World Police, as "the film’s utter disgust with air-headed, left-wing celebrity activism remains unmatched in popular culture". Actually, no surprise -- this is the anti-Sean Penn and Tim Robbins list. I can put up with all that. But this is my question: now I know that it's about how "the fads of modernity are no substitute for the permanent things", will I ever be able to enjoy Groundhog Day again?

Actually, wrong philosophy. A couple of years back, I reviewed Groundhog Day like this:

An existential classic. In the late 19th century, philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche proposed the doctrine of “eternal recurrence”: “The question in each and every thing, ‘Do you desire this once more and innumerable times more?’ would lie upon your actions as the greatest weight.” In the late 20th century, that Nietzschean dilemma was illustrated with wit, panache and brilliance by the team of Bill Murray (star) and Harold Ramis (writer/director).

Mr Orange and moral conflict

Rewatching Reservoir Dogs this week, the first time in more than a decade, I was caught by a line from critic Amy Taubin on the commentary: Reservoir Dogs unfolds in the time it takes undercover cop Mr Orange (Tim Roth) to bleed to death. Drop the prologue, she says, and that's how it works. After the title sequence, he is seen squealing and bloody in the back of the car driven by Mr White (Harvey Keitel), then he's on the floor of the warehouse the gang is using as a rendezvous in a pool of blood that gets deeper and darker as the film goes on. The first time I saw this -- probably 1993, a film festival -- I was reminded of something by Beckett or Sartre's No Exit. These doomed guys, this one dingy location, black humour and obvious fatalism. That warehouse had the feeling of a stage set (actually, it's a morgue with plastic sheeting draped over coffins and hearses -- apt for a story where almost no one gets out alive). I didn't single out any one character as mattering more than any other: Mr Pink (Steve Buscemi) and Mr Blonde (Michael Madsen) are clearly secondary players to Orange and White but Buscemi's comic relief is so well done and Madsen's notorious ear-slicing bit so memorable that they would hold an equal position in your memory of the film. Blonde, Orange and White all get back stories; Pink gets none -- yet he's the one who lives. But Taubin's line suggests that this was never a story about gangsters; it was always a story about an undercover cop. In this reading, the most important scenes in the film are the long flashback in which Orange is coached by another cop in how to tell a story about a criminal situation; he's like an actor learning a part, which is doubly clever when you consider that the British Roth was training himself in an American accent at the same time. These criminals take on identities just as actors do; Roth's character just takes on more layers of identity than most. Identity is conveyed through storytelling and when the criminal Orange, in his back story, encounters cops in a hotel bathroom, we see that they're listening to a long crime anecdote as well. The DVD's deleted scenes give us more of this, more of Orange's back story, more of his preparation, more of the world outside the repurposed morgue -- had these scenes gone into the original film the balance would have been tipped and there would be no question that this was always a film about the moral conflicts and difficulties of the undercover world and the brutality and unscrupulousness of the criminals you encounter in it (the White we warm to in the film is revealed as close to psychopathic in the deleted scene called "background check"). By leaving these scenes out, and making the film less Mr Orange's story and more the story of the cold-blooded White/Pink/Blonde, Tarantino's position in relation to criminality and violence became more ambiguous. Either that or he didn't really know how to get the moral conflict across.

Opportunism knocks

You'd expect that if this press release made it to a newspaper in Christchurch, New Zealand, then it's gone everywhere else in the world too:

PRESS RELEASE

Controversial director Damian Chapa to Release Roman Polanski Biopic on DVD in USA and theaters in Europe

Los Angeles, CA (MMD Newswire) October 6, 2009 -- The first biopic about the life of Director Roman Polanski will be released October 20 2009 on DVD everywhere in the United States, and selected theaters across Europe in November.
AMADEUS PICTURES for USA release teamed with Terra Entertainment an Victory Multimedia for the release. Also the film will run in selected theaters across Europe In November.
A monumental day for a revealing film that one critic describes as "a chilling portrait of one of the most controversial figures in the history of movies."
Spanning four decades, the film covers everything from a turbulent childhood in war torn Poland, the murder of his wife Sharon Tate by the infamous Charles Manson cult and the infamous rape case that lead to Polanski's exile to avoid incarceration by escaping to and maintaining residence in Europe.
Polanski Biopic on DVD
Considering the current legal disputes, it is unlikely Polanski will be in attendance, but for the rest you, as a popular critic put it, "Check it out - you'll thank me later." This is a film Hollywood does not want you to see, but must be seen to be believed.
"Polanski Unauthorized" is directed by and stars Damian Chapa who is famous for his lead role in Taylor Hackford's cult classic "Blood in Blood Out" as well as "Under Siege" starring Steven Seagal released by Warner Brothers. Chapa also starred in Brett Ratner's "Money Talks". Co-producer Edmund Druihlet says that it's the only film that has the truth and actually shows the rape.
The main cast includes: Damian Chapa (Roman Polanski), Leah Grimsson (13 year old Girl), Thomas Druilhet (The Devil), Brienne De Beau(Sharon Tate), Silvia Suvadova (Polanski's Mother), Christian Serritiello (Polanski's Father), and Paul James Saunders (Eugene Gatowski).
Reviews:
"A movie to cause talk, raise eyebrows, rattle cages and have Hollywood insiders blow their stacks!"
Robert Osborne, The Hollywood Reporter
"A chilling portrait of one of the most controversial figures in the history of movies."
Terry Keffe, The Hollywood Interview
"Chapa does an excellent job as the lead. Standout performances include Christian Serritiello as Polanski's father and Paul James Saunders as Polanski's financier."
Christopher J. Baca, Entertainment Weekly for El Paso
"Damian Chapa is brilliant he IS Polanski. The movie is a Masterpiece".
David Carradine
----
This press release distributed by Mass Media Distribution LLC, 3350 Riverwood Pkwy Suite 1900, Atlanta, Georgia 30339 USA.

Now, it might be argued that if you think your second-best film was the one you were in with Steven Seagal, then you're in trouble. Todd McCarthy in Variety in February:

Roman Polanski won't lose any sleep over "Polanski Unauthorized," a basement tape-quality slum through the most famously traumatic episodes in a sensation-riddled life. Straight-to-DVD auteur Damian Chapa invested little money, and less talent, in depicting the subject's escape from the Nazis, flirtation with devil worship on "Rosemary's Baby," relationship with Sharon Tate and arrest for raping a 13-year-old girl, moments from all of which are shuffled together almost at random. With production values no better than homemade porn -- most scenes are played in front of drapes -- and dialogue that makes you feel sorry for the actors, this Friday the 13th Los Angeles vanity release isn't even fun in a bad-movie way. Paying customers will feel gypped.
Too tall and too thick through the middle to play Polanski, Chapa does have something of the horny ferret about him that convinces on that level. Sight of Polanski coming on to the underaged model while plying her with drugs and drink is particularly gross, while representations of Frank Sinatra (mulling breaking Polanski's legs) and early producers Gene Gutowski and Martin Ransohoff are ultra-ludicrous.

Roman holiday

Jim Emmerson has one of the best pieces around on the whole Roman Polanski shemozzle. And with jokes:

Joke from Vince Mancini, about the filmmakers' petition in Polanski's defense: "The first signatory they list is Woody Allen. Said Polanski, 'Dude, you're not helping.' "

For something more incendiary: Katha Pollitt at The Nation.

The widespread support for Polanski shows the liberal cultural elite at its preening, fatuous worst. They may make great movies, write great books, and design beautiful things, they may have lots of noble humanitarian ideas and care, in the abstract, about all the right principles: equality under the law, for example. But in this case, they're just the white culture-class counterpart of hip-hop fans who stood by R. Kelly and Chris Brown and of sports fans who automatically support their favorite athletes when they're accused of beating their wives and raping hotel workers.

Much of this is convincing, but Pollitt's hypothetical "regular convicted sex criminal who had fled abroad" has one thing Polanski doesn't: we wouldn't know his name. Shouldn't the naming and shaming -- the (justifiable) damage to the reputation -- also be counted as part of the punishment?