At the Movies

Notes from all over:

Wendy Shalit in the WSJ on a surprising hit:

Imagine an actor who will not work alongside any woman other than his wife (who is not, by the way, a professional actress). Imagine a film in which the two leads are a bit on the zaftig side, appear with no stage makeup and never touch each other. Imagine their insisting that everyone else in the film--down to the extras--be religious Jews. Oh, and imagine that when the film finally appears, the husband-wife team cannot promote it because they just had their sixth child. Doesn't exactly sound like the makings of cinematic success, does it? And yet "Ushpizin," an Israeli import, has won several prestigious awards and is one of the highest grossing foreign films in America this year.

Jesus comes to Johannesburg - Peter Chattaway with news of a new film

Mary - a film that won prizes at Venice, about someone making a movie with a sort of DVC/Mary Mag v. Peter theme going on. Opens in France in a bit.

The Ice Harvest gets thumbs down from the critics cited at CT, but a reader of this blog has this to say about it:

Richard Russo has co-written and co-produced with Robert Benton the screenplay of a rather dark and commercial thriller, graphic in a number of ways (purposefully ugly nudity and there is violence), very uncomfortable to watch. Ice Harvest, from a skillful novel by Scott Phillips and directed by Harold Ramis (you can see the kinship to Groundhog Day). Not to overstate it, but it has some theological concerns -- set on Christmas Eve, it depicts a world (Wichita Kansas) in which humanity is almost totally without God, their souls are frozen. Most of the characters, even the most depraved ones, have a sense that there might be a different and better way to live, but are more or less clueless. (For example, in one funny bit, a vicious bouncer takes his family to Six Flags on Christmas Day). It is interesting to see what a serious novelist does on the commercial side.

Comments

[Patrick O'Hannigan]

Richard Russo's novels of upstate New York ("Nobody's Fool," "Mohawk") tend to be thoughtful, and Robert Benton is the guy who directed the Oscar-winning "Places in the Heart," so "Ice Harvest" would seem to have a good pedigree, at least, even without Harold "Groundhog Day" Ramis.

[Christopher]

I heartily, heartily recommend Ushpizin.

[Victor Morton]

Here is my review of USHPIZIN. It was a really strong pic.

[Victor Morton]

As for MARY, the less said, the better. I have no doubt that the prize it won at Venice was an f-you to Mel Gibson. It is not worthy of a prize at the world second-most-prestigious juried festival (and there's lots of films I don;t like that I realize are aesthetically distinguished and "prize-worthy). MARY is not. It is lazy, padded, unfocused and just felt unfinished and phoned-in.

For example, if you know anything about movie editing techniques (I don't mean by that you have to be able to write about them -- I mean **know anything**), you realize that apart from a brief opening scene, Juliette Binoche, probably the picture's biggest "name" thespian plays her entire role alone. Never sharing a frame with any other actor -- her role consists mostly of phone conversations and phone messages. Some shots of her by herself. But basically she is like something stitched in, only you can still see all the seams and the grafts that didn't quite take.

And then there's huge chunks -- and I mean several minutes at a time, which feels much longer than it is -- of the film literally given over to monologs of talking-head theologians spouting on this and that in re their views on Christianity, straight from the "a minister, priest and a rabbi" school of religious diversity. Except for their views. Elaine Pagels was among them, there were no representatives of religious orthodoxy I recognized, and the one obvious Catholic set off some of my alarm bells.

When director Abel Ferrara gave his post-film Q-and-A when I saw MARY at the Toronto Film Festival (he insisted on doing it sitting on the stage and not using a microphone), he said he had been to Catholic schools but never heard of Mary Magdelene. I'm thinking ... whaaaaaa....?????

[Victor Morton]

I meant of course that Binoche never shares a frame with any other NAME actor. You can always get warm bodies. My point was that the film felt stitched together and stretched out to feature length, and having your lead actors almost never in the same world tends to underline that.

[derringdo]

Your description of Mary's most obvious technical shortcoming made me laugh: it sounds so much like those 70s horror schlock pieces where Christopher Lee or Peter Cushing or Donald Pleasance pops in and out of the storyline and interacts with NOBODY, or the five billion spaghetti westerns that feature Klaus Kinski in a five-minute role.

Not comparisons I think the makers wanted to invite. :)