GET HIM TO THE GREEK, starring Jonah Hill, Russell Brand and Sean Combs, recently played the Malibu Cinema. I saw it like three weeks ago in New York.
I’m usually a fan of producer Judd Apatow’s canny understanding of what drives a guy’s pleasure-seeking instincts, and I was charmed by much about this film, particularly its biting portrayal of what’s left of the music industry’s star-making machinery, and also by a winning, emotionally honest performance by the underrated actress Elizabeth Moss (AMC’s “Mad Men”) as Hill’s utterly believable girlfriend.
But if you took in the picture during its Malibu Cinema run, you, like me, might have felt those barren deserts of situation comedy that I think ultimately marred — but didn’t totally sink — GET HIM TO THE GREEK.
I am thinking here of one bit in which Hill, Rand and Combs – along with, improbably, Colm Meany -- careen through 24 hours of sex-and-drug-fueled Las Vegas debauchery. That sequence could be described with the same word that could also sum up my entire late-spring-early summer movie going experience:
“tired”
Thank goodness for Sundance.
Summer is traditionally when those who make up the alternative cinema industrial complex test the commercial viability of the handful of “risky” titles that rise above the cream line each January in frosty Park City.
This year Malibu Surfside News Television made the scene to chronicle Sundance firsthand.
Now it’s up to you to seek out these challenging, entertaining pictures which, if the first half of this season is any indication, may be among the very best offerings of the dog days.
The good news: you have options beyond driving the Prius to date night in Santa Monica or parking the Escalade at the Landmark. You can also “demand” some of these movies at home from Charter Digital, or even download the cinema onto that XBox console gathering dust in the family room.
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The best fiction film I saw at Sundance is CYRUS, which also stars Jonah Hill as an equally innocent, surprisingly menacing LA man-child who still lives with his mom (Marisa Tomei) a complicated, conflicted and fully-realized woman on the verge of falling in love with the kind of terminally available man the incomparable John C. Reilly was born to play.
CYRUS is the first film born of a multipicture deal between the filmmaking brothers Mark and Jay Duplass (THE PUFFY CHAIR, BAGHEAD) and Fox Searchlight Pictures. That the money to make CYRUS came from a specialized division of a major studio hasn’t changed the brothers’ lo-fi, uncomplicated aesthetic; what it has done is allowed them to hire precisely the right actors to interpret it.
Though the dudes in CYRUS get you laughing (Reilly) then catch you deep in the gaze of a brilliant manipulator (Hill), CYRUS is really a modern-day women’s picture. Tomei shines.
The best Sundance movie I didn’t see at Sundance but watched on DVD press screener this week: Michael Winterbottom’s THE KILLER INSIDE ME starring Casey Affleck, Jessica Alba and Malibu homeowner Kate Hudson.
I’d avoided THE KILLER INSIDE ME at Sundance, or rather I missed the first screening, or was purposefully seeing something else, maybe that nine am press screening of THE RUNAWAYS. I can’t precisely remember.
But I do distinctly remember deciding not to pursue the film in all cases after reading a few words about it somewhere:
“misogynist,” “extreme violence” and “walk-outs.”
I once worked with Jessica Alba. She’s a peach. I had no desire to watch any character she plays getting beaten to death.
But when I was in New York I discovered, in the lobby of Manhattan’s IFC Center, on one of those foam-core-mounted blow ups, a late-Sundance essay by the Los Angeles Times’ Mark Olsen who had a similar, early-Festival word-of-mouth experience with THE KILLER INSIDE ME.
Unlike me, he was able to catch what seems safe to call a late-Festival “hail Mary” screening of the film.
What he wrote after that screening vindicated Winterbottom, praising his actors’ performances and also the way the filmmaker was intensely faithful to the Jim Thompson novel on which THE KILLER INSIDE ME is based.
Thompson’s relationship to cinema was explored on a recent cover story in the New York Times’ “Arts & Leisure” section, and between that article and what Olsen had to say I really have nothing to add, except that the picture lives up to what Stanley Kubrick, a Thompson collaborator, once said of the book:
“Probably the most chilling and believable first-person story of a criminally warped mind I have ever encountered.”
And this coming from the director of THE SHINING.
Now the fate of THE KILLER INSIDE ME is up to the audience which — if you like the way Casey Affleck can project, in a way few contemporary young actors can, the enigmatic conflict between the terrifying inner-workings of his character’s mind and the very opposite face he presents to the outside world — is probably you.
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Malibuites with any interest in or connection to show business must see the documentary JOAN RIVERS: A PIECE OF WORK as soon as they can and however they can.
The film is that rare, unfiltered look at a compulsive performer who, no matter how much gold leaf adorns the walls of her New York palace – er, apartment -- or how much plastic surgery she’s acquired, or how many times her career has seemed over, remains the truest , most liberating and above all funniest mainstream comic of her generation.
Parental warning: Rivers loves nothing more than telling her audience “%#*& you” and she does so right out of the gate. It got me started laughing, and then I couldn’t stop.
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Another doc which received a rousing Sundance reception: Oscar-winner Leon Gast’s look at New York “Paparazzo superstar” Ron Galella, most notorious for stalking Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis.
The title SMASH HIS CAMERA is both a promise and a threat: Jackie O once asked a secret service agent to do just that.
But by couching Galella’s work in artistic and news-gathering terms, which the pap himself is eager to do – Gast plays on our more liberal sensibilities.
A click around HBO’s website reveals a cool gallery of Galella’s work – the first three images of which show Malibu celebs Barbra Streisand, Sean Penn and Madonna and Dustin Hoffman in situations where they’d clearly rather not have their picture taken.
Garnering thousands of hits on our youtube channel, our interview with Gast and Galella from Sundance was by far our most popular post.
On the other end of the documentary spectrum is the bracing, deadly serious RESTREPO, which will surely go down as one of the greatest war films of our era.
From June 2007 to July 2008, filmmakers Tim Hetherington and Sebastian (The Perfect Storm) Junger embedded with the soldiers of Second Platoon, Battle Company in the remote Korengal Valley in eastern Afghanistan as they fought to build and maintain a remote 15-man outpost named “Restrepo,” after a platoon medic who was killed in action.
While the film captures modern warfare – its stupidity, its sorrow, its heroism — as never seen before, the filmmakers somehow manage to avoid politicizing it. Instead, we see how it is actually lived – endured? — by soldiers, through their own eyes and in their own words.
RESTREPO is the definitive long-form portrait of a war most of us probably don’t know enough about.
You can see our Sundance interview with filmmakers Junger and Hetherington here.
The imagery RESTREPO captures depicts true combat situations and may be disturbing to some. RESTREPO is released by National Geographic Feature Films.
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Next to the Joan Rivers doc, CROPSEY may be the New York-iest movie a Malibu person absolutely must make an effort to see. It’s a documentary about the real-life “boogey man” of Staten Island – a story about how urban legend may have contributed to the hard time being served by one really creepy, and probably guilty, certainly potently manipulative, convict; about how a bunch of bored kids keep the legend alive to this day; about the far reach of community activism; and about how a search for answers – even by a then-emerging reporter named Geraldo Rivera — often digs up evermore questions.
If you want to read more about CROPSEY, and about seeing movies in New York, and about graffiti and racism and what it’s like to be back in Malibu, just scroll to the next post.
In the meantime, this is how you find all of the movies discussed in this essay:
GET HIM TO THE GREEK
Try the Regency in Agoura Hills, the Mann Westlake Village, the Edwards Grand Place Calabasas, the Muvico in Thousand Oaks
CYRUS
Now playing at the Landmark on Pico Blvd.
THE KILLER INSIDE ME
Now playing at the Nuart in West LA, on demand via Charter Digital Cable
JOAN RIVERS: A PIECE OF WORK
The Landmark on Pico Blvd, on demand via Charter Digital Cable
RESTREPO
Opening at the Landmark starting 6/25; an LA-area expansion on 7/ 9 is to include Laemmle’s Sunset 5 in West Hollywood, Laemmle’s Town Center 5 in Encino.
SMASH HIS CAMERA
Airs on HBO SIGNATURE on 6/24 and 7/14 at odd hours (this is why DVR was invented)
CROPSEY
Opens at LA’s Downtown Independent 7/9; available on demand 7/2. Check www.gravitasventures.com/films.html
You have lived in Malibu for the last two years but tonight, a Sunday night that will soon be a Monday morning, you are starting the third week of a month-long job in New York. Because the job is on a movie shooting deep in Queens, essentially what would have been Archie Bunker’s neighborhood, you ride the subway more than you ever did during the decade you lived and worked on Manhattan’s Upper West Side.
This night you take the A train from the station at West 4th Street and Sixth Avenue to 72nd Street and Central Park West. Despite the lateness of the hour the subway car is full enough that you feel more comfortable standing than taking a seat. Maybe this is why you take particular notice of your surroundings, namely the transit campaign a local television station has bought for nightly 11:30pm and 12:30am broadcasts of “Seinfeld” re-runs.
Killing time, you try to figure out the logic of the campaign: how could its enormous cost possibly be justified? How many straphangers could it motivate to look again at re-runs of episodes they’ve surely seen countless times, if they were ever interested in “Seinfeld” to begin with?
The retro campaign, and the fact that this is an older subway car – rebuilt by Morrison-Knudsen in 1991, according to a small plaque affixed next to the motorman’s door – makes you feel like you are travelling not on contemporary urban mass transit but rather in a clattering, semi-air-conditioned time machine. It was way back in1990 that a New York Times critic first reviewed Seinfeld’s pioneering half-hour show based on a stand-up comedy act that, like Roseanne Barr’s but unlike Jackie Mason’s, “comes tantalizingly close to making it.”
Your head is already alive with vintage video.
You are coming from a movie house that sits atop that West 4th Street station, where you watched a documentary, CROPSEY, about a convicted kidnapper who may or may not be the true-life ‘boogey man’ of Staten Island.
As the old subway car carries you under Manhattan you think of that other island borough and the decaying ruins of a long-abandoned mental institution there.
At one time called Willbowbrook, the ruins and the network of creepy tunnels that lie beneath it certainly spawned urban legend and possibly hosted Satanic rituals, which may or may not figure into the still-unsolved cases of a number of long-missing Staten Island children, the majority of whom were mentally disabled.
The documentary makes liberal use of old news footage, most of which has since morphed into a mess of degraded video smear. It depicts an era that New Yorkers today refer to as “pre-Guiliani”: the dawn of “Seinfeld” and newly re-built subway cars, yes, but also of high crime, rampant homelessness and the occasional race riot.
Giuliani made a point of turning his police force’s attention to what he called “quality of life” crimes: the pot dealer in Washington Square Park, the ticket scalper in front of Madison Square Garden, the graffiti tagger on the F train.
You thought of the Giuliani approach just the other night when you watched, out of the corner of your eye, a tagger deface a panel inside an F train taking you from Queens.
You were exhausted; it was around three in the morning and except for you and the tagger and a couple of other equally exhausted passengers, the car of this particular F train was empty.
It was one of the new, brightly-lit, supposedly graffiti-proof subway trains, the kind with automated station stop announcements and bench-like seats.
The tagger — young enough to have no fear of getting caught yet old enough to know better – had skin the color of coffee ice cream. He wore a baseball cap and madras shorts. He used an expensive, alcohol-based permanent marker with a wide tip. He was taking his time.
You wanted to see the tagger’s work, so as you got off the train at your stop you glanced in his direction. It’s only then that you noticed that half the car is covered with ad s for “Seinfeld” re-runs, and the tagger’s wide-tipped pen has essentially covered Kramer’s face with black ink.
You find this interesting because a few years ago – long after “Seinfeld” was cancelled, Michael Richards, the actor who’d played Kramer, was vilified for unleashing the n-word on a heckler at a comedy club.
The tagger seemed not to notice you watching him and continued his work as the train pulled out of the station.
Your current subway time machine goes into overdrive: somewhere around Times Square two women, both claiming to be homeless and hungry, enter at opposite ends of the car. You are in the middle of the car, and by the next stop their paths have crossed just where you are standing, and you experience for a moment their solicitations in stereo.
Two years have passed since you were last in New York; you don’t remember seeing this many homeless.
At the 50th Street station a number of people crowd into the car and you make way for them by heading to the front, and that’s where you see Kramer’s face, covered in black ink. You know right away was put there by the same tagger. He must be on some kind of a black-face Kramer bender.
Then you notice that this panel has a thought bubble: “I’m a ni**er!”
The lettering spelling out the n-word is crude, as if the train had hit a curve as the artist’s black marker put it down. The exclamation point, you think, was certainly a choice, though you can’t decide if the thought bubble was meant to be coming from Kramer or from Michael Richards.
You get off the train at 72nd Street and Central Park West.
You recall once seeing Peter Jennings walking his dog and smoking a cigar around here. On another night, you think on this same stretch of sidewalk, you once came upon a teenage Macaulay Culkin amidst a crowd of friends.
You recall that both encounters happened at the end of different opening night parties for the New York Film Festival. Then you remember that Tavern on the Green has since closed, that in all likelihood the New York Film Festival party will never be held there again.
You get to the corner of 72nd street, over which the Dakota looms. You think of a scene composed by the director of the film you are here to work on. By the time you reach the far side of Columbus Avenue you are deep in thought about the directors’ re-creation of a famous photo of the RFK assassination.
But then rants of “ni**er” this and “mother%&#!er” that explode from a street person less than half a block away. Your reverie interrupted, you keep walking, a little more quickly, towards your rented room with private bath.
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You are back on the compound in Malibu. Thoughts run together.
You have re-adjusted to a life of quiet but you miss surfing the waves of information coming at you in four daily newspapers. You miss wading in the river of weeklies, into the sea of the corner newsstand.
In Malibu, your biggest decision has to do with returning the tools you borrowed from your mother and her husband two months ago. Will you need those metal shears or that sledge hammer anytime soon?
You feed the hens, the cat.
You water the garden, which has exploded in the four weeks you were away.
You measure the fence line that will soon theoretically secure the still theoretical goats.
But a glimpse at the Malibu Surfside News brings back everything you saw in New York, and more.
Racist graffiti meant to mock the family of a missing person last seen nine months ago at the Lost Hills Sheriff station and those advocating on her behalf has shocked the community.
You think about the missing Staten Island kids in CROPSEY. You think about how Satanic graffiti all over the decaying remains of the Willowbrook mental hospital there supports both a currently healthy urban legend and also the case against the man who today sits in an upstate New York prison, serving time for two SI murders, even though only one body was ever found.
You have dinner with your dad and his wife at a steak house in Beverly Hills. When you tell your father about the rainy night the movie you were working on used Staten Island as a location, he mentions that he once did graduate work on Staten Island, at the research facilities of a place called Willowbrook Mental Hospital.
You think that maybe Manhattan and Staten Island and Queens are not all that far away from Los Angeles and Malibu and Beverly Hills. And you wonder what Larry David might make of all this. Funny, yes, but not exactly funny=ha-ha, or really even funny=weird.
Malibu Surfside News Television invited all 10 City Council candidates to sit for a video interview. Nine of the candidates joined us, and were given a minute to answer each of the same seven questions: Why are you the best candidate on the ballot? Who do you want to see elected to the second seat on the ballot, and why? What are the three most important issues now facing Malibu? What is your position on these? Which issue do you want to tackle first, if you are elected? Is there a current municipal policy or project you would try to change, if you are elected? If you are not elected, what role do you intend to play in city government? The interviews have been posted here in alphabetical order so please scroll down to view all of them.
Malibu Surfside News Television invited all 10 City Council candidates to sit for a video interview. Nine of the candidates joined us, and were given a minute to answer each of the same seven questions: Why are you the best candidate on the ballot? Who do you want to see elected to the second seat on the ballot, and why? What are the three most important issues now facing Malibu? What is your position on these? Which issue do you want to tackle first, if you are elected? Is there a current municipal policy or project you would try to change, if you are elected? If you are not elected, what role do you intend to play in city government? The interviews have been posted here in alphabetical order so please scroll up and down to view all of them.
Malibu Surfside News Television invited all 10 City Council candidates to sit for a video interview. Nine of the candidates joined us, and were given a minute to answer each of the same seven questions: Why are you the best candidate on the ballot? Who do you want to see elected to the second seat on the ballot, and why? What are the three most important issues now facing Malibu? What is your position on these? Which issue do you want to tackle first, if you are elected? Is there a current municipal policy or project you would try to change, if you are elected? If you are not elected, what role do you intend to play in city government? The interviews have been posted here in alphabetical order so please scroll up and down to view all of them.
Malibu Surfside News Television invited all 10 City Council candidates to sit for a video interview. Nine of the candidates joined us, and were given a minute to answer each of the same seven questions: Why are you the best candidate on the ballot? Who do you want to see elected to the second seat on the ballot, and why? What are the three most important issues now facing Malibu? What is your position on these? Which issue do you want to tackle first, if you are elected? Is there a current municipal policy or project you would try to change, if you are elected? If you are not elected, what role do you intend to play in city government? The interviews have been posted here in alphabetical order so please scroll up and down to view all of them.
Malibu Surfside News Television invited all 10 City Council candidates to sit for a video interview. Nine of the candidates joined us, and were given a minute to answer each of the same seven questions: Why are you the best candidate on the ballot? Who do you want to see elected to the second seat on the ballot, and why? What are the three most important issues now facing Malibu? What is your position on these? Which issue do you want to tackle first, if you are elected? Is there a current municipal policy or project you would try to change, if you are elected? If you are not elected, what role do you intend to play in city government? The interviews have been posted here in alphabetical order so please scroll up and down to view all of them.
Malibu Surfside News Television invited all 10 City Council candidates to sit for a video interview. Nine of the candidates joined us, and were given a minute to answer each of the same seven questions: Why are you the best candidate on the ballot? Who do you want to see elected to the second seat on the ballot, and why? What are the three most important issues now facing Malibu? What is your position on these? Which issue do you want to tackle first, if you are elected? Is there a current municipal policy or project you would try to change, if you are elected? If you are not elected, what role do you intend to play in city government? The interviews have been posted here in alphabetical order so please scroll up and down to view all of them.
Malibu Surfside News Television invited all 10 City Council candidates to sit for a video interview. Nine of the candidates joined us, and were given a minute to answer each of the same seven questions: Why are you the best candidate on the ballot? Who do you want to see elected to the second seat on the ballot, and why? What are the three most important issues now facing Malibu? What is your position on these? Which issue do you want to tackle first, if you are elected? Is there a current municipal policy or project you would try to change, if you are elected? If you are not elected, what role do you intend to play in city government? The interviews have been posted here in alphabetical order so please scroll up and down to view all of them.
Malibu Surfside News Television invited all 10 City Council candidates to sit for a video interview. Nine of the candidates joined us, and were given a minute to answer each of the same seven questions: Why are you the best candidate on the ballot? Who do you want to see elected to the second seat on the ballot, and why? What are the three most important issues now facing Malibu? What is your position on these? Which issue do you want to tackle first, if you are elected? Is there a current municipal policy or project you would try to change, if you are elected? If you are not elected, what role do you intend to play in city government? The interviews have been posted here in alphabetical order so please scroll up and down to view all of them.
Malibu Surfside News Television invited all 10 City Council candidates to sit for a video interview. Nine of the candidates joined us, and were given a minute to answer each of the same seven questions: Why are you the best candidate on the ballot? Who do you want to see elected to the second seat on the ballot, and why? What are the three most important issues now facing Malibu? What is your position on these? Which issue do you want to tackle first, if you are elected? Is there a current municipal policy or project you would try to change, if you are elected? If you are not elected, what role do you intend to play in city government? The interviews have been posted here in alphabetical order so please scroll up to view all of them.
View the trailer for the Oscar-nominated documentary “The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers.” Did you know Ellsberg lived in Malibu as he photocopied thousands of pages of a top-secret RAND corporation report that would become The Pentagon Papers?
IFC Films is inviting audiences who prefer their British crime dramas epic, profane, boozy and smoky to devote 315 minutes to three films by three directors that focus on the same string of abductions by the so-called Yorkshire Ripper and the reporters, cops and lawyers who investigated the crimes in 1974, 1980 and 1983. The films, collectively called the “Red Riding Trilogy,” are available “on demand” to Malibuites served by Charter Cable’s digital package.
Which is why I feel OK about using one classic British made-for-telly crime series as a kind of yardstick with which to judge “Red Riding – 1974,” directed by Julian Jarrold, “Red Riding – 1980” directed by James Marsh and “Red Riding – 1983,” directed by Anand Tucker. I am thinking here of the last installment of the addictive “Prime Suspect” series starring Helen Mirren, which in 2006 saw our heroine waging a mighty battle with alcohol as she railed against corruption, sexism, serial killers and her own obsolescence.
It’s that last, noir-y bit the “Red Riding” films share most “Prime Suspect”: the deepening sense that for all of their smarts, dedication and even heroism, these (all-male) protagonists have little sense of the futility of their pursuits until, of course, there is no turning back.
In Jarrold’s opening film, newcomer-to-watch Andrew Garfield plays a cub reporter for the Yorkshire Post. In Marsh’s 1980 twister – Marsh won the Best Documentary Oscar last year for “Man on Wire” – hangdog Paddy Considine (“The Bourn Ultimatum”) plays the unlucky Assistant Chief Constable of the Manchester police brought in to jumpstart the investigation and examine the activities of the West Yorkshire police. And in Tucker’s film Mark Addy (affable star of “The Full Monty”) plays a hang-gutted solicitor who discovers, in a memorable sequence of jailhouse interviews, what’s really been going on from a whole new perspective.
With all that testosterone infusing the cigarette smoke it’s a wonder certain female performances stand out at all. In Marsh’s “Red Riding – 1980” look for a character named Helen Marshall, a female detective who could easily evolve into someone like Jane Tennison, played with reserved smarts by Maxine Peake. In Jarrold’s “Red Riding – 1974” a grieving mother and widow with ambiguous desire is memorably played by Rebecca Hall, whose work reminded me of the Oscar-winning vulnerability Kim Basinger brought to “L.A. Confidential.”
Gender notwithstanding, the two huge performances of the Trilogy are by Eddie Marsan and Sean Bean.
Marsan, so electrifying as Sally Hawkins’ seething driving instructor in last season’s “Happy Go Lucky,” here sports a gnarly mullet and a worse attitude, the kind of guy who misses the urinal and the whole noble point of investigative journalism in the same scene.
Appearing in the first and third of the trilogy, Sean Bean’s work as the acquisitive real estate developer John Dawson haunts the entire “Red Riding” enterprise. As Dawson charms his way into the socioeconomic fabric of this Yorkshire neighborhood’s paternity, Bean appears mortally in tune with everything around him, from the 70s era wardrobe and white shag carpeting to that weird thing he has for swans.
At times arty but never boring, “Red Riding Trilogy” will not be for everyone. Patience will be rewarded as you settle into the North England accents, the thickest of which can’t conceal its inhabitants’ most caustic vernacular.
Locals may remember seeing Chase Crawford around town when he attended Pepperdine; now we can see him each week on “Gossip Girl” and in the future we’ll see him starring in “Twelve,” Joel Schumacher’s latest film that closed Sundance. Here’s an unfiltered talk with Chase about where he lived in Malibu, how he learned about the sale of “Twelve,” what he learned from Schumacher and if he’s ever thought about directing.
On the other side of our awards night montage, starring 50 Cent, Joseph Gordon-Levitt and eerily photographed SFF director of programming Trevor Groth, you’ll be rewarded with the opinions of Sean Means, film critic for the Salt Lake Tribune. Means, who knows more about Sundance than any journalist on the planet, gives Sundance 2010 high marks.
Here we talk with Joel Schumacher about the company that bought his movie and Chase Crawford. Schumacher’s first screen credit, according to IMDBpro, is Costume Designer on Frank Perry’s big screen adapation of Joan Didion’s Play It As It Lays. One day, Mr. Schumacher, we must have a much longer conversation about that very-hard-to-see film.
Here “Super-Size Me!” director Morgan Spurlock presents the US Documentary award for Directing to Leon Gast, whose “Smash His Camera” we covered early on. Scroll down to find our interview with Gast and subject Ron Galella. For some reason, that clip has attracted over 1600 hits.
Louis C.K. disses mainstream movies and presents the Audience Award to Josh Radnor, whose “happythankyoumoreplease” screened in the US Dramatic Competition. Radnor’s sense of gratitude here is nicely in sync with the theme of his movie, which was the subject of our first post.
Here Louis C.K. riffs on Fest sponsor Honda, talks about driving an ‘82 Prelude in ‘95 and presents US Doc Competition Audience Award to Davis Guggenheim for “Waiting for Superman.”
