New Amelia Film.

Speaking of biopics, this is a new film about Amelia Earhart starring Hillary Swank as Amelia. Ok, already it has a strike against it. I remember reading a terrible novel titled "I am Amelia Earhart" that Dan has reviewed. It is quite funny because the author is also the same one who wrote this book about a tampon tea party.

Or as Dan says: " In closing, I think Howard Stern was right- Don Imus should be shot, and Jane Mendelsohn sexually assaulted (note the gentility) by Cossacks. Perhaps then she could feel the pain she gave me. Cue the bodice. Sing, Elmer, sing!"

Sylvia Trailer.

Here's another biopic, this time on Sylvia, the 2003 film with Gwyneth Paltrow as Plath. It's not a good film either--rather cliched, trite and the filming itself isn't interesting or good, and neither is the screenplay. The directors of these films just love to portray the lives of these artists as so pedestrian. When I saw this I thought Daniel Craig was cute (pre-Bond) and too good looking to portray Ted Hughes. Here's the trailer to this film, and you can watch the whole film on You Tube if you want. Part 1 is embedded.

So enjoy watching! It's a real whodunit!



Part 1:

Total Eclipse: Rimbaud and Stuff.

Here's another biopic, this time on Rimbaud. I've seen this one, and Leo Dicaprio plays Rimbaud and some other guy plays Verlaine. Ok, you know the story right? Melodrama, love affair, poetry, death, etc. One of Dan's friends loves this film but I think it's pretty much worthless.

It just gives all the cliches of the artist, one by one. And the film referred to Rimbaud as a "genius" and Verlaine as a "great poet." Well, Rimbaud had some moments here and there but was overall, an immature writer. But Verlaine sucked ass.

Beat Trailer.

Some were discussing Ginsberg on the e-list and so I was put in mind of this film. I've actually not seen it--Dan reviewed it, but I didn't bother watching it, as he wasn't too favorable of it and the Beats give me a headache anyway. Ron Livingston, the guy from Office Space, plays Ginsberg.

On O'Keeffe: A Lifetime Movie.

Dan and I do not have cable, so we don't get the girly station of "Lifetime." Though someone on the e-list told me about this film yesterday, which I got to watch last night. You can watch it here online for free.

The film stars Jeremy Irons as Alfred Stieglitz and Joan Allen as O'Keeffe. I would never think of Joan Allen looking anything like O'Keeffe, but she sort of does. But real acting kudos goes to Jeremy Irons. He played the role of Humbert in the remake of Lolita, and I don't think there is a role the man can't do.

Anyway, this isn't a great film or anything, but it's a good and watchable made for tv movie. It could have been a lot worse, considering the anal hemorrhages that pass for films about artists, shit like The Hours. It is clear, at least made indicated by the film, that Stieglitz respected Georgia as an artist, but not as a wife. In one scene when she says she wants to have a kid, he shouts, "You were put on this earth to paint, not to breed."

That, and add the fact that he was cheating on her with this young skank, as men are known to do.

Joan Allen as O'Keeffe:

Anyway, another interesting point the film makes is that Georgia got her initial fame via her famous photographer boyfriend/hubby pinning nude shots of her for all to see. Then after all the sycophantic artist wannabes saw them, they were suddenly interested in her paintings.

Stieglitz notes that had it not been for him, she would have been an unknown, probably for most of her life. Granted, her talent was enough to earn her eventual recognition, but it was the luck of meeting the famous photographer that enabled her to get people interested in her work, thus allowing her to be able to make a living off it throughout her life. Quality, however, is irrelevant in the short term.

Wouldn't it be nice to be married to a famous photographer who takes naked pictures of you and makes you famous, thus enabling you to be taken "seriously" as an artist. Just goes to show that even back then, fame/sales/association were all people cared about. At least one can't claim human nature isn't consistent when it comes to greed, stupidity and shallow values.

I'm Not There

In being a great devourer of Bob Dylan, I have had more often the pleasure than not, to englut and subject this self to nigh everything the man has produced and grazed: his feeble forays into prose and cinema - Tarantula and Renaldo and Clara, respectively, his cameos in others' works: Sam Peckinpah's 1973 Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid and Larry Charles' 2003 Masked and Anonymous, along with every bootleg and interview I could seize my hands and ears upon; this is the unforgivable ignorance of worship within youth, in particular when you decree everything a masterwork predicated solely on past glories. I've since cooled to Dylan, remembering his past presence though unmoved to fall any true thought atop him.

Having known of Todd Haynes' 2007 I'm Not There and its crux - six different actors playing each a character based on but not quite Bob Dylan - well before its release, I was all no and neuroses, believing, fearing that this was a mistake and an impossibility to pull off. Thus was the reason for my abstaining from it until this past week. This known and said, having my frights fleshed albeit on a television screen, I was merely minorly disappointed for my expectations had dwindled to crumbs at this point.

I suppose I shall commence by giving a precis of each Dylan in order of their emerging. The first incarnation we fully encounter is a young black boy (Marcus Carl Franklin) who calls himself Woody Guthrie with "This Machine Kills Fascists" scrawled about his guitar case and all, this owed to the real Dylan's obsession with the real Guthrie when he first began his career. The child recounts stories he's doubtless created and rehearsed in a mirror in assembling his legend. He takes up then with a family where he sings and they feed him. He soon leaves after a descent into reality via the matriarch who sees through him and the talk of boxcars, by telling him to sing of his own time, after his fraud being found out he hops another train where he is accosted by hobos who attempt to rob him. To escape, he jumps from the moving train to be met by a river. He awakens in a hospital finding that a couple has salvaged him and is subsequently taken in by them. He is soon found out anew this time when a phone call by a youth correctional center is received by the family which leads to his leaving to seek out the true Woody Guthrie who lay now decaying in a hospital room in New Jersey. The young Woody delivers flowers and songs to his namesake.

The theme of being "made" and seen through and the subsequent fleeing is a recurring one that wields not as much power as one would expect. This will be further illumed in the imminent descriptions of each remaining Dylan.

Our second surrogate is Arthur Rimbaud (yes, christened after that Arthur Rimbaud), he portrays Dylan as the poet he'd always been weakly described as by critics. I see no point in these moments in the film, they are worthless truly. We have the cardboard Ben Winshaw as Rimbaud spilling ceaseless quips and quotes of life and art intermittently besprinkled within the film that become boring, repetitious, and ultimately unnecessary.

Third up is Christian Bale as Jack Rollins, Dylan as "the folk singing prophet and voice of a generation", creator of the "finger pointing songs" of the early 1960's. His story and housed and heard in the form of a documentary where we are assaulted by various fictional talking heads, namely Alice Fabian (Julianne Moore as Joan Baez?) telling how he touched them, how great he was, essentially blowing him. The recreation of settings is superb; the early performances; "The Times They Are A-Changing" on black and white television and Rollins gently relaying "The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll" to a small a crowd on a farm. The echoing of actions and interviews are something of a different strain entirely. When Rollins shakes in anxiety while being interviewed you don't believe it, just as much as when he claims to have seen "something that Lee Harvey Oswald felt in him." Only the real Dylan could behave and feel such a way and make them feel authentic for this was the character he'd spent his existence up to that point cultivating. Certainly not any one or six actors could have shifted my perception on this, regardless of how much they look or sound like him. Rollins occurs again, as a preacher reformed from his past lives, seized by Christianity. What troubles me is that we are never given full reason for this need and conversion, only a new talking head who told him to pray one day. Dylan die-hards know why and Haynes' commentary expounds, but the casual viewer is left with only a thin answer.

Next we get Heath Ledger as Robbie Clark, an actor who portrays Jack Rollins in a biopic. This tale tells of how Robbie and his wife Claire (Charlotte Gainsbourg) met became rapt within each other and ultimately unraveled. Their relationship seems to sustain for as long as the Vietnam War does. This section just as the others never plunges beyond the surface which is a shame because this is primed material properly ripened. Gainsbourg carves what she can given the material, but we are only allowed the same uniformity that films' depictions of marriage these days seem to be about; the husband ignores the wife, fucks other women, and regrets it only when its too late.

Since I've known Cate Blanchett was to recreate Bob Dylan, I was afraid, in especial since she won an Oscar for her impression of Katherine Hepburn in The Aviator , and was nominated for her attempt at Jude Quinn, Dylan's electric period mirroring, in this film. This was expected; the mimicry and mere skimming of flesh, but never to this extent. Of Dylan's creative peak, the one that sired the triad of Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited, and Blonde on Blonde, we are met with the flower and never the root, which is not the folk facet of out hero, but the true person, before everything. The film gives itself opportunity when reporter Keenan Jones (the ever good Bruce Greenwood) exposes Quinn on television as being from a suburban, middle class Massachusetts family. Instead of choosing to plumb Quinn's emotions and motives, we get him moiling about a typewriter avenging himself creatively, scored by David Cross as Allen Ginsberg reading a passage about revenge from Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Yeah, Allen Ginsberg shows up at some point of this story on a golf cart as Quinn is being interviewed by Jones. His presence is as superfluous as Michelle Williams' as Coco Rivington, an ersatz Edie Sedgwick, in a dream sequence that echoes 8 1/2 , whom Quinn wants after an earlier unseen incident. They exchange odd barbs and Quinn resigns. Decadence seizes this passage of the film, where we glimpse the rock star life: drugs, parties, more drugs, etc. and never an eye into the creative process. There's nothing here to grab hold of aside from the musical interludes which are weakened by forcing Jones the reporter into the role of Mr. Jones from "Ballad of a Thin Man". Such could probably box the entire of my thoughts on the film, but there is more.

Richard Gere embodies Dylan as the recluse, Billy the Kid, who retreats from the world after, the viewer is never sure of, but fans of Dylan will see it as the mirroring of Dylan's burrowing into obscurity into Woodstock, New York after a 1967 motorcycle accident. The town, Riddle, is flooded of death - murder and suicide and the ruin rained by Pat Garrett (Bruce Greenwood again) with Greenwood portraying what threatens to slay the artist anew. Billy confronts Garrett on Halloween at the funeral of a young girl, asking Garrett to leave town. Billy is immediately arrested. He soon escapes, hops a train sees his dog who'd run away earlier and departs. Finding the guitar case that reads "This Machine Kills Fascists", we gather this is the concluding bookend to Woody's story and thus Dylan's life hitherto. And all ends with footage of the real Dylan atop stage from 1966.

I agnize the urge to limn Dylan so freely and unconventionally, but when the attempts sing futile and feeble with each actor, aside from Richard Gere, embodying ever impersonation and never immersion, all fails. The vertiginous effect of never settling screams of Haynes not believing in his material for had he, he would've had one actor inhabit this panoply of personae or focus on one event in each of his character's lives. For he doesn't, his attempts transcend never gimmick nor hipster preening. Perchance the mimetic was Haynes' intent; a Post Modern punching and poking at the biopic. Though I doubt it, if it was, he has succeeded. But Dylan is of himself, a self-supplying cannibal, the Ouroboros and only he could make such feelings, every tremble and every bon mot real. All these avatars did was show and denude how much of an act Mr. Zimmerman truly was, is

The film's second most salient failing is the wishing to spread itself over every corner and crevice of existence, a common reason most biopics fail. This cubist circus could have gotten away with its most prevalent theme of rebirth were it not so blatant and unballasted by the past. Each time his mask/armor is obliterated either by himself (Jack Rollins) or someone else (Jones' undoing of Quinn), he retreats within himself and emerges someone new, a flesh assembled tabula rasa, acknowledging rarely if ever the catalyst and/or the past.

Haynes' aping of Godard and Fellini are without neither pretense nor piling of the director's own ideas. They play as homely homage, simply stagnating. This is thin compared to the act of echo and recreation as in Woody Allen's masterful Another Woman, where the main character, a woman of fifty encounters in a daydream her brother as a teenager and he unbosoms he feelings, his wishes and fears. Taking its cue from Ingmar Bergman's Wild Strawberries, Allen cores into emotion in a frightening way, building off his Swedish antecedent, not merely tracing it.

The film is nude of revelation, which is something I believe needed in the biopic. What has rendered this man this way; what is he eluding? Why? Not that we need answers, but hell, an acknowledgment or two toward his pathology, his impulses and his emotions would have sung sufficience. All we are presented are grazings of the surface, beauteous visuals, and hollow mimicry.

This may have been too mountainous an assaying for Haynes and all involved. His smaller films: Safe and Far From Heaven play more coherent in all spheres than this and even his simple, diluted Velvet Goldmine. I seek not narrative as most detractors of this film do, simply truth and revelation.

The soundtrack to the film is a more revelatory experience playing as variorum, from first to finish with contributions from pillars as sundry as Stephen Malkmus and Roger McGuinn, which renders as a whole more the gradual unfurling of a career and life than the film's hurried unraveling.

In finishing, with all I've written said, I cannot wholly not recommend this film, for it is hypnotic and enthralling within even its failings. Perhaps I am biased for I am a Dylan fan, perhaps a film about a man so infinitely interesting as Dylan cannot and should not be shunned.

The Queen.

I watched the film The Queen the other day, the one that of course won Helen Mirren the Oscar. She definitely did a terrific acting job, though the film itself was rather straightforward and dull. Or maybe that's just because it's about a bunch of uptight Brits. Oh and James Cromwell was in it too, and he was just as great. It just shows the range he does have, from playing the Queen's hubby to George H.W. Bush.

The film focuses around the event of Princess Diana's death, and how the Queen refused to address the issue publicly. I actually got this DVD when it was selling for like $5 at Circuit City's liquidation sale.

You can watch the trailer here if you're interested.



Pretty much it's just standard directing, no real great shots. More like a "made for T.V. movie" than a real film. Why don't they make those anymore? They were at least campy fun. Straightforward but well acted. If you didn't know of this period of history, the story itself isn't that interesting to stand on its own. I don't think that years from now many will care what the Queen did after Diana's death. But this does give a slice of the Royal Life, if that's what you're into.

W.

A while back I went and saw Oliver Stone's latest, W., on President Bush. I reviewed it here. Overall, a disappointing film, nothing to compare with Nixon nor JFK, but then, it's been over a decade since Stone last had a good film.

The trailer is below. At least Woody Allen has had a few good films since his Golden Era of 1977-92 ended. Stone? We'll see.