To Sean on His 47th Birthday

It's 2:30am in Chicago, which means it's barely after midnight in California, so it's officially Sean's birthday, but don't wake him; he needs his sleep. The new movie he directed opens in a month, so unless he's down in Venezuela or in the Middle East somewhere, making a slight show of himself but also sticking with his political convictions and using his money to achieve something real, let's assume he's making editing tucks or getting the press junket going for Into the Wild. I loved the book, and I like the trailer, so even though none of Sean's other directing projects has really jelled for me, I'm hopeful about this one.

I also still assume that, one day, he will call. I still mean every word of this. I saw The Assassination of Richard Nixon in the theater. I even saw All the King's Men in the theater. I make my students watch The Thin Red Line. I watched the Meta-Free-Phor-All with Stephen Colbert and Robert Pinsky, and I don't even get Comedy Central. I can be sweet. I can be lowdown. Please advise, etc.

Unlucky Stars

Watching miscast actors give poor performances is just miserable, because there's nothing you can do for them except watch them wriggle. The experience is particularly dolorous when the performers are estimably better than the current script or picture is allowing them to be, and it's worst of all when they are the kind of honest, committed joes who don't just sleepwalk through a bad movie or an ill-fitting vehicle or a poorly written part, but who instead keep trying to redeem the experience. If they're lucky, like Jodie Foster was in Inside Man, the rest of the film hums along with such confidence and panache, making such roomy allowances for experiment and unexpected silliness, that the failure to bring a character into focus doesn't register all that much. (Plus, having beheld Foster's embattled, nostril-flaring resolve one too many times on screen, I found her loose, daring miscalculations in Inside Man almost a pleasure in themselves.) The early fall, however, has brimmed with less fortunate actors, wrangling in vain with major roles in movies that aren't good enough to compensate for them or to distract our attention. You might have thought that the miscasting and careless directing of actors couldn't get any worse than it did in The Black Dahlia, and—well, maybe you're still right. But these three movies, all of them worse than the addled but unnerving Dahlia, give Brian De Palma and casting directors Lucy Boulting and Johanna Ray a dismal run for their money:

Hollywoodland
Director: Allen Coulter
(Mis)Casting Director: Joanna Colbert
This flat-footed procedural offers a marginal Hollywood malfeasance as some kind of plangently tragic conundrum. The question of who killed George Reeves (Ben Affleck), the star of TV's Superman, gets sieved and re-sieved through the dully interlocking stories of his failure to score better parts, his affair with a studio boss' wife (Diane Lane), and his later relationship with a piranha who doesn't care about him (Robin Tunney). Plus, he has the bad luck to be posthumously investigated by a swaggering, irritating, hotheaded detective, instead of by someone that a movie audience might actually want to spend two hours with. Sadly, there is no ironic resonance in the fact that Adrien Brody has barely less contempt for his part as the detective than Reeves had for his padded-suit Man of Steel. Brody constantly winks that he's way too cool for this shoddily written role, perhaps too cool for the industry as a whole—though he sure looks awfully sincere whenever he spouts one of the script's limping banalities about the loneliness of fame or the distorting power of the newsmedia. Presumably, Brody is only too happy to let Affleck hoard all the big press, which reached a sort of dadaist climax when he won the Best Actor award at Venice in September. I can only assume that Catherine Deneuve and her fellow jurors were bribed (money? gelato? weed?) into seeing something remarkable in Affleck's sad spectacle. The "takes one to know one" thesis behind this casting might sound nervy on paper, but however well the sullied inadequacy of Affleck's career and abilities are meant to rhyme with those of Reeves, we still have his minuscule range, stolid physicality, and inveterate self-regard to contend with. Hollywoodland never makes a case that Reeves' death is worth probing, or even mourning; as on Superman, his humanity is utterly stifled by lousy production values and unrewarding stunts. D–

The Science of Sleep
Director: Michel Gondry
(Mis)Casting Director: Julie Navarro
This antic, inventively disheveled, but egregiously overconceptualized movie wins some points for ultimately defying the goopy winsomeness that keeps threatening to take it over. For a long, long time, the mismatch between the giddy, colorful, through-the-looking-glass romanticism of Gondry's visuals and the flat, ashy mundanity of the central love story feels like a galling error. Ultimately, the film justifies our skepticism in a scene of wormy, exhausted anger that's unlike almost anything else in the movie, but the backloading of the film's intelligence isn't sufficient reward for having made it through 100 minutes of capricious indulgence. Gondry, who also wrote the script, has immersed us too heavily, too often, and with such mismanaged abruptness in the arrested-adolescent projections of his protagonist that I, for one, was too exhausted to make the leap into the film's climactic revelations. Plus, to fill the role of a restive, pouting, sexually repressed manchild, Gondry and Navarro have tapped, of all people, Gael García Bernal, whose handsome charisma, confident comportment, and lithe accessibility to both the audience and his fellow actors all make him woefully wrong for this Pee Wee Herman/Chuck & Buck type. Granted, The Science of Sleep would lack much force of irony or discovery had it typecast the part with more overt maladjustment, but García Bernal looks itchy and effortful throughout. Neither he nor Charlotte Gainsbourg looks remotely at peace inside the clamorous, surrealist set-design. In fact, everyone looks uncertain as to how their writer-director is going to pull all of this chaos and whimsy and distant, thrumming sadness into something architecturally sound and emotionally lucid. Few people could or would make a film like this, but the question remains open whether anyone should—especially with a reigning global sex-symbol toiling so far afield from any of his tonal, psychological, technical, or linguistic comfort zones. C

All the King's Men
Director: Steven Zaillian
(Mis)Casting Director: Avy Kaufman
By its very example, All the King's Men formulates an even more stinging indictment of Hollywood than Hollywoodland does in two hours of direct address. King's Men plays as a veritable autopsy of itself; to watch the movie is to watch it go wrong, to observe the tempting gleam of the film that might have been grow ever dimmer. James Horner's score is so hammering and colossal from the outset that you can foresee how overstated and mechanical the whole damned beast is going to be. One is tempted, retroactively, to cede even more of the success of Zaillian's previous features—Searching for Bobby Fischer and A Civil Action—to the subtle, rookie-friendly wisdom of the late Conrad Hall. Sadly, in his stead, cinematographer Pawel Edelman inappropriately mimics the same palette of deep black, burnished golds, and scattered patches of white that made The Pianist both elegant and harrowing, but this look is all wrong for New Orleans, and not nearly complex enough to keep pace with the dense, multi-character plot. Not that Zaillian's script has preserved the plot all that well, either—entire subplots, like the fate of Willie Stark's son, are telegraphed and semaphored without ever reaching their destinations. But the real tragedy of All the King's Men is that its entire cast of luminaries, splashed all over the most self-canonizing preview trailer since Cinderella Man, fall so collectively and humiliatingly on their faces. Jude Law trots out his rendition of the cynical bystander as long as he possibly can; James Gandolfini is amateurish and flat, failing despite his physical heft to plausibly intimidate Sean Penn; Penn himself gives great, deranged stump speeches but falls back repeatedly on old tics in all his other scenes; Mark Ruffalo is milky and hesitant; Patricia Clarkson mines her role for bitter comedy as a way to stand apart from Mercedes McCambridge's long shadow, which fully eclipses her anyway. Worst in show, I'm sorry to say, is Kate Winslet, who doesn't seem to know this admittedly unknowable woman at all, who squats under a succession of terrible wigs, who loses a whole monologue beneath a needlessly overlaid voiceover by Jude Law, and who is lensed again and again through butter-colored scrims and in pools of french vanilla. Having failed to learn her David Gale lesson about staying well away from Southern political dramas, Winslet has only this as a silver lining: Gwyneth Paltrow starred in Hush, Halle Berry in Swordfish, Charlize Theron in The Italian Job, and Reese Witherspoon in Just Like Heaven in the same years they all won their Oscars. The Little Children camp may as well start crossing their fingers. C–

(Image © 2006 Columbia Pictures)

Happy 46th, Sean —

Enjoy your day. Blow out all your candles. Here's to 46 more years of genius... speaking of which, I'll look forward to seeing you and Jude and Kate and Patricia next month! Should be quite a party.

(Image © 2004 WireImage.com, reproduced from Sean's IMDb Photo Gallery)

Grammy Love

How kind of the Grammy Award nominators to court me so personally. My reply to these nominations?: I do, I do! My girl Mariah is right out there in front with eight nominations, including the fact that "We Belong Together" is the only song up for Record and Song of the Year. She even worked in a plug for "Mine Again," the Mimi track you are most likely to wail along to in your kitchen, while you cook, if you're me; this is what I call an Emancipation proclamation. Missy Elliott, booty-shakin' shaman of our age, didn't do too shabbily, either, with five nods for her own songs, her duet with Ciara, her production work with Neptunes, and her video for "Lose Control." Gwen Stefani's "Hollaback Girl" stomped its feet like this in a bunch of nominations, including Record of the Year.

But the nomination for Sean Penn? Grammy make me lose control.

The Doctor... Is Back In

A lot can happen in four weeks: I officially filed my dissertation, got my certificate, packed my house (with a little... okay, a lot of help from good friends), moved to Connecticut, unpacked, took a weekend trip to New York City, checked in with my family in Virginia, came back to New York to read some beautiful Walt Whitman poems at my friend's absolutely delicious wedding, arrived back in Hartford, and finally got my phone and internet turned on, two and a half weeks after I arrived. The e-mail DTs have been shaking and quaking me, and I know half the people in my life think I've met the fate of the Grizzly Man, but lo, I am alive, and this blog will be back up and running in no time.

After all, there is plenty to say, including:

• A modified version of Cinemarati is back up, and it's more nutritious, better-looking, and more fun than ever!
  
  
• The New York Film Festival looms on the autumn horizon, with a newly-announced lineup that includes Michael Haneke, Lars von Trier, and the much-hyped Romanian breakthrough The Death of Mr. Lazarescu.
  
  
• Hayao Miyazaki's Howl's Moving Castle, the last movie I saw in Ithaca, is not quite up to the level of Spirited Away but is still enough to raise the bar on 2005 at the movies.
  
  
• Can I just say again how sensational that wedding was? This probably won't be the last time I mention it. Props to same-sex couples expressing their devotion and commitment and love in public, and beautifully, too.
  
  
• The year's best film so far, at least on my watch, is the tantalizing French character study-cum-thriller The Beat That My Heart Skipped, featuring some master-class editing by Juliette Welfling, and a stunning sound design that features another terrific score from Alexandre Desplat. (Yep, and the acting and the writing are top-notch, too.)
  
  
• Michael Winterbottom's sex-filled and endlessly maligned 9 Songs is actually one of the year's more compelling films, if you ask me...
  
  
• ...and if you keep asking me, and I hope you will, since you're reading this site, Jim Jarmusch's Broken Flowers, fresh from its Cannes prize and reveling in a warm batch of rhapsodic reviews, is actually a jaw-dropping piece of crap. Though the essayists at the interesting on-line film journal Reverse Shot mostly take Jarmusch's side.

More on all of this and more in the coming days, but finally, while it's still in the gloaming hours of August 17, don't let me forget to mention that today is the birthday of America's greatest working actor (Male Division—don't worry, Julianne and Joan), not to mention the official husband of this blog. You can catch My Sean acting exceptionally in almost every role he assumes. I first started paying attention during 1995's Dead Man Walking, but I really fell in love during 1998's one-two punch of his implosive, reptilian, and cracked lead performance in Hurlyburly (rent it!) and his complicated, muted character work in Terrence Malick's The Thin Red Line. Among his recent performances, the pick of the litter is in one of his least hyped films, last winter's peculiar true-crime snapshot The Assassination of Richard Nixon.

All right, you few, you patient. Hang in there with me as I get back to work! (And say a little prayer for Sean—namely, that the upcoming remake of All the King's Men does justice to the magnificent novel, and to the contemporary world that this 60-year-old story still has much to say to. I'm keeping my fingers crossed for you, Sean! Now blow out your candles!)