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Post by Ace on Sept 13, 2007 20:58:03 GMT -5
Rachel on Etalk Daily from the Premiere etalkbroadband.ctv.ca/?vid=14984 It's 10 minutes but she's only in the first two and there are a couple of clips from the film with Pierce- one dancing www.ctv.ca/entertainmentOr if you can download mms files: [url=mms://a180.v31560.c31560.g.vm.akamaistream.net/7/180/31560/66ce8bb3/ctvakamai.insinc.com/akamai/ctv/etalk/ETAL/ETAL-ETAL-070913-EP.clip01-video.wmv ]The direct link[/url] (it's 74mb)
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Post by Lauryn on Sept 14, 2007 13:17:20 GMT -5
Ooh, thanks for finding this, Ace. It sounds like all of the actors really clicked and enjoyed being an ensemble. Patricia Clarkson carries over her excellent taste in film roles to her excellent taste in actors. It sounds like she was quite swept off her feet by the SMA's -- how shall we put it -- "je ne sais quoi." Or we could just say, as she did, that he's "yummy" LOL!! It's fun to imagine her on set doing hex signs behind Rachel McAdams' back, hoping the girl would break a leg before the love scenes and Pierce's character would suddenly discover the pleasures of getting horizontal with his best friend's wife instead of this blonde bit of fluff.
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Post by Ace on Sept 14, 2007 15:15:33 GMT -5
You have to love that her first instinctual reaction to the mention of his name is a sigh and a hand to her heart. And the use of the word "beguiling" -- yes you can imagine her hexing Rachel or at least hoping for a re-write. Also Chris Copper taking all the gushing (by Patricia and interviewer) with bemused humor and inserting that men like him too (for different reasons) LOL I've added some photos from the Premiere -- mostly of Rachel (who looked adorable) but some of Patty (looking lovely and in matching colors to Rachel) and a very under dressed Cooper. pbfiles.t35.com/marriage/index.html
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Post by Ace on Sept 14, 2007 15:20:29 GMT -5
Reviews which once again praise Pierce but first announce his supposed previous shortcomings. From the A.V. Club Toronto Film Festival '07: Day Eight posted by: Scott Tobias September 14, 2007 - 3:01am www.avclub.com/content/blog/toronto_film_festival_07_day_eigh_0Married Life (dir. Ira Sachs): Back when he was first tapped to play 007, I dismissed Pierce Brosnan as a straight-to-video James Bond, but his recent career has completely turned me around. Rather than preserve that suave Bond image, he’s been working hard to deconstruct his screen persona by exploiting it to diabolical (or, in the case of The Matador, downright pathetic) ends. His work as a committed bachelor who takes an interest in best friend Chris Cooper’s mistress (Rachel McAdams)—and the performances of the other actors in general, including Patricia Clarkson as Cooper’s long-suffering wife—give Sachs’ melodrama, set among people of privilege in post-war America, the precious distinction it needs. The only serious problem with the film is its familiarity: Every week on AMC, the excellent Mad Men covers much the same territory (marital discord behind a placid surface, devastating sexual duplicity, etc.) with greater insight. And it’s free! (B) [Tobias is putting it mildly - a quote from his TOP review - With his inhumanly chiseled good looks and smarmy, practiced gentleman's charm, Pierce Brosnan has always come across as a second-rate James Bond, a low-rent, straight-to-video facsimile of the real thing. Yet those qualities add immeasurably to his inspired casting as a womanizing, opportunistic secret agent in John Boorman's The Tailor Of Panama, a sophisticated and witty adaptation of the John Le Carré novel. ] Poland: The Hot Blog: Sex As A Weapon www.mcnblogs.com/thehotblog/archives/2007/09/sex_as_a_weapon.htmlWhat struck me most about Ira Sachs’ Married Life was the actors. The film is basically a four character piece approximating the style of 40’s noir, often threatening to bring forth modern notions, but then choosing not to, limiting just how interesting the experience will be. Chris Cooper is sublime, as always. He just isn’t capable of walking through a film. Patricia Clarkson has become a true master of the camera. You can actually see her using the angles and light with her own instincts sometimes. Rachel McAdams finds yet another character to play who is completely different than what she has done before. But it is Pierce Brosnan who really struck me in the film. He is finally aging into the time where he can be a better looking Fred MacMurray, circa the Wilder period. He has been such a good looking guy that he has never quite looked relaxed on the big screen. But here, really for the first time, he does. (The Matador is a good performance, but a self-parody, which is easier.) It is easier to imagine that he will have a significant third act in movies now. The movie really isn’t bad. The muted response here is probably because critics were hoping for something as challenging as Sachs’ 40 Shades Of Blue. It’s not. Also working this angle at the festival is Francois Ozon’s Angel, which is so close to the vest that audiences are afraid to laugh through much of the film’s dry satire of Southern Gothic films. The lead character, Angel, clearly is a Barbara Cartland type who really thinks she is Scarlett O’Hara. In Married Life, you keep waiting for the moment that McA’s character expresses that she really wants a guy who wants her sex and not just her nursing… something that is expressed, again relatively subtly, by Clarkson’s character. It’s funny. Sachs’ movie is daring mostly in that it argues that romanticism is a failed idea. Explosive sexual chemistry overwhelms the search for romantic love for all but one character in the film. And sexual deceit is what wins the day, without judgment. Interesting… but I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop. [Poland has developed amnesia about The Matador -- now just a good performance that was an easy self parody (when before it was excellent - and forgetting everything before and since (or maybe he missed Seraphim Falls) . He also seems to miss the point that he's most likely the one uncomfortable watching a too good looking SMA on screen and is finally getting over it. There's no reason being great looking makes one ill at ease on screen - that's foolish. ]
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Post by Lauryn on Sept 14, 2007 16:26:18 GMT -5
Reviews which once again praise Pierce but first announce his supposed previous shortcomings. Egads, will it never stop! I'm beginning to despair of a review that praises a Brosnan performance without feeling obliged to pull out a mothballed laundry list of dreary old opinions that references Bond (every other PB role being a volte-face or a parody thereof) or his too-good looks. And conveniently all Brosnan's acting / career problem to overcome but not their silly perception. Hmm. If Poland really has come around to dismiss PB's high wire, ambidextrous performance in "The Matador" as "easy" then, (as we often have suspected) he knows sweet FA about acting. I'd agree that Brosnan could pull off the MacMurray role in "Double Indemnity" <winks to Ace> but not that his career's just now grown into an interesting "third act." He's been transitioning to mature roles for some years now, and certainly playing them lately. And what is Poland on about with that pining for "modern notions" so as not to "limit" the film -- when it deals with themes that have surrounded men and women as long as they've been thinking and feeling sexual beings? That aside, I'm not surprised that DP did make room for the movie on his schedule. To put it delicately, he has a mid-life crush on Rachel McAdams.
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Post by Ace on Sept 14, 2007 16:58:03 GMT -5
It might stop, but I think we'll both be dead by then. As if becoming a better looking Fred McMurray is some great career achievement /leap for Pierce. Sure he could do Double Indemnity with one arm behind his back or almost any role McMurray essayed. Pierce has far greater range. Of recent roles- Crown, Osnard, Grey Owl, Desmond Doyle, Julian Noble, Gideon - Fred could probably only come close to pulling off Osnard and really not that close.
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Post by Lauryn on Sept 14, 2007 17:05:31 GMT -5
Over at www.moviecitynews.com/ they have the link for Poland's review of Married Life and a picture of Rachel McAdams juxtaposed with the lead-in to DP's pan of "Elizabeth: the Golden Age." The "Married Life" link goes to the "Elizabeth" review. You can still find ML linked correctly to its review if you go to their Toronto Fest page and access it from there, after you've first "learned" that Married Life has "way too much story" and is a waste of its Oscar winning cast. The mistake is easy to spot, but a lot of readers might not go the extra steps to suss out the real link and review.
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Post by Lauryn on Sept 14, 2007 17:16:22 GMT -5
It might stop, but I think we'll both be dead by then. As if becoming a better looking Fred McMurray is some great career achievement /leap for Pierce. Sure he could do Double Indemnity with one arm behind his back or almost any role McMurray essayed. Pierce has far greater range. Of recent roles- Crown, Osnard, Grey Owl, Desmond Doyle, Julian Noble, Gideon - Fred could probably only come close to pulling off Osnard and really not that close. MacMurray was more interesting in the movies than in television, at least when playing rather caddish opportunistic roles as he did in "Double Indemnity" and "The Apartment" but, true, he's never exhibited a very towering range. I used to kid MJ over at Mysterynet about that "sexual dynamo" Fred MacMurray because she found the more "nasty" side of him a bit of a turn-on. (See what Wilder can do for an actor, LOL!) And funny, Pierce can do both the TV (with pipe) and the movie Fred, LOL!
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Post by Ace on Sept 14, 2007 18:35:16 GMT -5
Yes, he did the pipe Fred to perfection in Mars Attacks. Here's the earlier ETalk TIFF Premiere bit with McAdams, Coper and Clarkson and clips cut down and downloadable from my site and medifire: www.mediafire.com/?fmggd0wcazm (10 mb)
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Post by Ace on Sept 15, 2007 0:19:48 GMT -5
There's very muddled (noise & bizarre angles) of the stage part of the film presentation with Sachs and cast on Youtube.
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Post by Ace on Sept 15, 2007 4:00:55 GMT -5
There was talk in Variety of Kimmel being close to a deal with a US distributor to tie in with the Canadian distribution deal. Then lo and behold the TIFF page for Married Life has a recent update for a website "under construction" with the url www.marriedlife-themovie.comThis is the exact same kind of URL that other Kimmel/MGM films like Lars and Bartlet have (and not like the ones for Focus etc) and other MGM films have (like 1408) So my guess is the film has gone back to MGM.
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Post by Ace on Sept 15, 2007 13:03:20 GMT -5
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Post by Lauryn on Sept 16, 2007 13:35:18 GMT -5
Yes, he did the pipe Fred to perfection in Mars Attacks. Yeah, the effect was discombobulating, though, on a certain level. Did Sarah Jessica Parker ever get the urge to lean over and say, "I thought you married that chick named Barbara so she could be a mom to your three sons. But she was destined to be your mother-in-law on Remington Steele. Isn't that kinda weird?
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Post by Ace on Sept 16, 2007 14:05:28 GMT -5
LOL!!! Though PB's Mars Attacks Prof was probably closer to MacMurray's Absent Minded Professor. It's funny though that Poland refers to PB finally aging into a Wilder period MacMurray when MacMurray was 36 in Double Indemnity. Still, I much prefer the James Mason(ic) comparison of Uhlich.
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Post by Ace on Sept 16, 2007 17:26:44 GMT -5
Cleveland Sun Blog: A respected director, an insightful actorPosted by John Urbancich September 13, 2007 20:35PM Categories: torontofilm Celebrities continue to flock in and out of this world's biggest film showcase -- at least this week -- as TIFF '07 winds down. *** Another chat I really enjoyed came Wednesday with Chris Cooper, the Academy Award winner for "Adaptation." He was here for his latest, "Married Life," a rare lead role for the fine character actor, but he was mostly quick to laud his co-stars, including Patricia Clarkson, Rachel McAdams and Pierce Brosnan. The lush romantic suspenser from writer/director/producer Ira Sachs ("Forty Shades of Blue") has Cooper playing a husband who would rather kill his wife (Clarkson) than see her suffer his leaving for his younger girlfriend (McAdams). "If you really break it down, this is my grandfather's period," Cooper said. "This guy, Harry, was 53 in 1949, so he was born at the turn of the century and may well have been a soldier in World War I. "Actors like to talk about all the research that they do and, with this particular one, other than seeing what was happening in the late '40s, this was all from me. This was all working from imagination and then incorporating some touches of my own marriage and life experience." Cooper, 56, has been married 23 years to fellow actor Marianne Leone. (She played the ongoing role of mother to Michael Imperioli's Christopher Moltisanti on HBO's "The Sopranos.") The missus also is writing Cooper's next project. "It's a very dear story and we're trying like the devil to get the money for it and, if we do, we'll be in production in November," Cooper said "She wrote me a nice role, and Patty (Clarkson) would be the lead in it, and we hope that Bill Macy and some other folks -- maybe I shouldn't say that yet -- have pretty much committed to it. We hope to start in November up here in Toronto." Tentatively titled "Hurricane Mary," the film revolves around a New York woman who helped changed laws so that her twin daughters, both stricken with cerebral palsy, could get a decent public school education. Both girls now are in college. "The story makes Marianne very qualified, probably the best qualified, to write the script," Cooper said. "We went through the same thing with our son for a year and a half when we moved to Massachusetts, trying to get him into public school." Cooper and Leone's son Jesse died at age 17 from complications with the disease. "He was the greatest thing that ever happened to us and, in a business where you can be quite selfish, he was a teacher and taught us the real important things," Cooper concluded through misty eyes. "We were trying to get him ready for college because he would've done really well there." We'll spend more time with this wonderfully down-to-earth movie star when "Married Life" comes to town later this year.
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Post by Ace on Sept 18, 2007 0:48:53 GMT -5
And drumroll it's not Focus , it's not MGM it's SPC... Sony Pictures Classics (yes Sony again bit it's SPC which is different - I hope) Hollywood Reporter: SPC commits to 'Married'By Gregg Goldstein Sept 18, 2007 NEW YORK -- Sony Pictures Classics has picked up North American rights to Ira Sachs' Toronto International Film Festival entry "Married Life." The post-World War II drama from Sidney Kimmel Entertainment and Firm Films follows a meek man (Chris Cooper) who falls for a beautiful, younger woman (Rachel McAdams). His main obstacles are his good friend (Pierce Brosnan) with an equally strong attraction to her and his controlling wife (Patricia Clarkson), whom he'd like to spare the agony of divorce by poisoning her. "Married" is an official selection of this month's New York Film Festival. The film received mixed reaction from an initial buyers' screening this summer. But its final cut debuted to a warmer response in Toronto. The deal closed late Sunday, toward festival's end. Sachs ("The Delta") and Oren Moverman ("I'm Not There") adapted their screenplay from John Bingham's novel "Five Roundabouts to Heaven." Sidney Kimmel, Jawal Nga, Steve Golin and Sachs produced the project. William Horberg, David Nicksay, Geoff Stier, Adam Shulman, Matt Littin, Alix Madigan-Yorkin and Bruce Toll served as executive producers. The sale is another success for SKE, which emerged from Toronto with Oscar buzz for "Lars and the Real Girl," its release through a new partnership with MGM. Other films on the horizon include Charlie Kaufman's directorial debut, "Synecdoche, New York." SKE's Horberg acquired Khaled Hosseini's novel "The Kite Runner," which SKE is producing with DreamWorks, Participant Prods. and Parkes/MacDonald Prods. for release by Paramount Vantage in the winter.
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Post by Ace on Sept 18, 2007 4:43:10 GMT -5
Two interesting articles, one from France and one from Argentina. Pity Altavista and my long rusty college French/high school Spanish aren't all that exact but I think you can get the gist. If someone far more proficient in French and Spanish would care to translate please do. One discusses the atmosphere at the screening and the other is a rave for the film. The article from Le Monde explains why there's no review from Variety. The critic came late and got shut out. Le Monde: Scènes d’un marché canadien (9-12-07)C’est le matin, mardi, dans une salle réfrigérée du multiplexe qui abrite le festival de Toronto. On y projette Blood Brothers, un film de gangsters taïwanais, produit par John Woo. Un homme se lève au bout d’un quart d’heure. Dès qu’il est sorti, deux autres personnes quittent leur siège. L’homme revient en disant “tu as vu ma tactique pour faire partir les confrères?”. Il plaisante, mais pas tout à fait. Il est acheteur de films. En sortant de la salle, il a signifié son peu d’intérêt pour le film, faisant baisser la pression sur les autres acheteurs présents dans la salle, puisque dans cette profession, tout le monde se connaît. Du coup les hésitants ont suivi son exemple et mis un terme à leur pensum, puisque le film est plutôt raté. Le soir-même, à la sortie de Married Life, le second film d’Ira Sachs, le tableau est très différent. Le premier long métrage de Sachs Forty Shades of Blue, a été remarqué un peu partout dans le monde, a accumulé les critiques élogieuses à défaut de millions de dollars. Married Life est interprété par Pierce Brosnan, Chris Cooper, Patricia Clarkson, Rachel McAdams. C’est un film d’époque, une histoire adultérine dans l’Amérique de l’après Seconde Guerre mondiale. La salle est pleine à craquer, un critique de Variety arrive trop tard pour rentrer (à Toronto, il n’y a de passe-droit pour personne). Pendant la projection, à peine une dizaine de personnes s’en est allée pendant la projection. Et à la sortie, on voit, soigneusement espacés afin que les uns ne puissent entendre les conversations des autres, quelques personnes agrippées à leurs téléphones portables, qui mettent en branle les négociations pour l’achat du film. Scenes of a Canadian market It is the morning, Tuesday, in a room cooled of multiplexes which shelters the festival of Toronto. One projects there Blood Brothers, a film of Taïwanees gangsters, produced by John Woo. A man rises at the end of fifteen minutes. As soon as he left, two other people leave their seat. The man returns while saying “you saw my tactic to make leave the fellow-members?”. He jokes, but not completely. He is a film purchaser. While leaving the room, it meant its little of interest for film, cause a drop in the pressure on the other purchasers present in the room, since in this profession, everyone knows itself. Blow the hesitant ones followed its example and put a term to their pensum, since the film is rather missed That evening at the screening of Married Life, the second film of Ira Sachs, the scene is very different. The first full-length film of Sachs Forty Shades of Blue, was noticed a little everywhere in the world, accumulated eulogistic criticisms in the absence of millions of dollars. Married Life is interpreted by Pierce Brosnan, Chris Cooper, Patricia Clarkson, Rachel McAdams. It is a film of an era, an adulterous history in America after the Second World War. The room is full to cracking, a critic of Variety returns too late (in Toronto, there is preferential treatment for no one). During projection, hardly ten people leave during projection. And at the exit, one sees, carefully spaced so that ones cannot hear the conversations of the others, some people clutching their portable telephones, which set in motion the negotiations for the purchase of film. CINEMA: FESTIVAL THE INTERNATIONAL OF TORONTO Clarin: La hora del suspenso (9-14-07)Se vieron "Reservation Road", con Mark Ruffalo y Joaquin Phoenix, y "Married Life", con Pierce Brosnan.Pablo O. Scholz TORONTO ENVIADO ESPECIAL *** Y otro título que, con suerte, conoceremos en la Argentina en algún lejano momento de 2008 es Married Life, de Ira Sachs, en la que confluyen con sabiduría el thriller, el drama y el romance. El personaje de Pierce Brosnan tiene a su cargo el relato del filme. Amigo de Henry (Chris Cooper), sabe que este engaña a su esposa (Patricia Claarkson, de Six Feet Under) con Kay (Rachael McAdams), de la cual el también está enamorado. Henry planea envenenar a su mujer, sin saber que esta lo engaña con otro joven. Ambientada en los años '40, deja de lado el glamour, pero no pierde la manera en que se relacionan los personajes, muy típico del Hollywood dorado. Como dijo anteayer Michael Caine en entrevista con Clarín, "John Huston decía que la clave para dirigir un buen elenco está en elegir un buen casting. Todo lo demás sale solo". Y en Married Life las cosas salen como Dios, o John Huston hubiera querido. The hour of Suspense: They saw “Reservation Road”, with Mark Ruffalo and Joaquin Phoenix, and “Married Life”, with Pierce Brosnan.**** And another title that, with luck, we will see in Argentina at some distant moment of 2008 is Married Life, of Ira Sachs, in which the thriller, the drama and the romance come together with wisdom. The personage of Pierce Brosnan has to his position the story of films. Friend of Henry (Chris Cooper), knows that this he deceives his wife (Patricia Clarkson, of Six Feet Under) with Kay (Rachael McAdams), of who also is enamored. Henry glides to poison his woman, without knowledge that this deceives it with another young person. Acclimated in the years of the '40s, it has glamour, but it does not lose the way in which the personages are related, very typical of golden Hollywood. As Michael Caine in an interview with Clarin said the day before yesterday, “John Huston said that the key to directing well is in choosing good casting. All the others leave single”. And in Married Life the casting is from God, or as John Huston had wanted.
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Post by Ace on Sept 18, 2007 9:11:21 GMT -5
New York Post: SPC Sparks To 'Married Life' (9-18-07)Those classy guys who run Sony Pictures Classics, Michael Barker and Tom Bernard, went into the Toronto Film Festival with a record nine titles and have gone home with ten. The Hollywood Reporter says SPC, for an undisclosed sum, has picked up the rights to Ira Sachs "Married Life,'' one of surprisingly few titles at the upcoming New York Film Festival that was without U.S. distribution. The flick stars Oscar-winner Chris Cooper as a middle-aged milquetoast who falls for beautiful Rachel McAdams (welcome back!). Two obstacles: he's married to Patricia Clarkson and McAdams is more interested in his best friend, Pierce Brosnan. It's unclear when product-loaded SPC will release "Married Life,'' which boasts 11 producers. Posted by Lou Lumenick on September 18, 2007 09:10 AM
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Post by Ace on Sept 18, 2007 13:37:13 GMT -5
Village Voice: So Close, and Yet So Far - The intimate pleasures and necessary detachments of Toronto 2007 (9-18-07)by Nathan Lee September 18th, 2007 11:49 AM The exemplary achievements of the 2007 Toronto International Film Festival succeeded by two means: either narrowing the gap between author and subject in pursuit of intimate effects, or else working distance into the material and profiting from the vantage. Contemporary neorealism at its most confident and alert, Chop Shop finds writer-director Ramin Bahrani so thoroughly immersed in a working-class puddle of Queens you can smell the motor oil. At the opposite pole, Werner Herzog reports from Antarctica on his Encounters at the End of the World in a tone so quizzically bemused that to call it a "nature documentary" is almost a joke—and funny it is to hear the director grill a penguin expert on the animal's capacity for homosexuality and madness. An unflinching engagement with the ugly facts of life distinguishes Before I Forget, Jacques Nolot's scathingly confessional account of the financial and emotional legacies passed down through multiple generations of hustlers and their johns. Paul Schrader takes a more measured approach, to quietly caustic effect, in The Walker, starring Woody Harrelson as a high-class Washington, D.C., gigolo who finds himself exploited by the power wives he manipulates for a living. Here's as close as I'll get to touching the Great Abortion Master Theme of 2007: At Toronto, the super-with-it-yet-out-of-touch comedy Juno, about a high-school wiseass who's keeping her baby, met its antidote in the hardcore mommy shocker A l'Interieur. This nasty number from France stars Beatrice Dalle as an enigmatic psychopath who terrorizes a pregnant woman in the most repellent, uncompromising, they-are-so-not- releasing-this-fucked-up-shit-uncut-in- America fashion. A scissor in the belly put the madness in the Midnight Madness program for real, though Takashi Miike did his part with Sukiyaki Western Django, a movie that opens with a lurid prelude featuring Quentin Tarantino striking grindhouse cowboy postures, proceeds to tell a ridiculous saga of color-coded Japanese bandits squabbling for gold and speaking in phonetic English, then continues on, as so often with Miike, and on and on and on. Another maverick with a penchant for extreme duration, Manoel de Oliveira, keeps things brisk in Christopher Columbus, the Enigma, a curious essay on the possible Portuguese origins of the legendary Italian explorer. Based on a book of the same name by a real-life husband-and- wife team of Columbus revisionists, the movie is part literary adaptation, part scholarly romance, part impish exercise in avant-garde nationalism, and altogether enchanting. Ira Sachs imagines Married Life in the style of a Hitchcockian domestic-suspense picture, with Chris Cooper as a conflicted patriarch, Patricia Clarkson as the object of his murderous marital impulses, Rachel McAdams as a disastrous platinum-blonde mistress, and Pierce Brosnan as a charismatic cad and incorrigible scene stealer. Where Sachs builds too much distance into the material, Noah Baumbach improves on his autobiographical The Squid and the Whale by stepping away from his bobo Brooklyn upbringing to visit Margot at the Wedding. Nicole Kidman (slightly miscast) plays the pinched, estranged sister of Jennifer Jason Leigh (unnervingly exact), whose engagement to a genial vulgarian (an improbably restrained Jack Black) is the pretext for passive-aggressive psychological terrorism—and scene upon scene of deft, acerbic, despairingly funny insight. The long view and the close encounter are not mutually exclusive, and the one film at Toronto with a possible claim on masterpiece status is the one that managed to generate the greatest intensity of feeling through the most preposterously complicated means. It's amazing enough the way Todd Haynes splinters his Bob Dylan biopic I'm Not There across six different, equally inspired performances, with Marcus Carl Franklin as the apprentice, Christian Bale as the born-again Christian, Cate Blanchett as the electric rebel of the '60s, Heath Ledger as an actor playing Dylan, Ben Whishaw as the poet . . . Rimbaud, and Richard Gere incarnating Dylan incarnate as Billy the Kid. More amazing still is how harmoniously Haynes arranges and sustains this semiotic free fall through the Dylan history and myth without losing dramatic momentum or indulging the hagiographic impulse. But the deep wonderment of this strange and wondrous picture is how language so aggressively mediated, so insistently postmodern, and so apparently nostalgic can speak with such eloquence about the world right now. A movie about the struggle to negotiate freedom, creativity, and political integrity in a media-addled culture at a time of war, I'm Not There has everything and nothing to do with Bob Dylan.
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Post by Ace on Sept 18, 2007 14:15:43 GMT -5
Columbus Dispatch Blog: Toronto Film Festival: Wrap UpMelissa Starker on September 14, 200 OK, to be honest I'm cheating a bit. I didn't have any time to get a blog posting done before my flight home. Instead of coming directly from the excitement of Toronto, this is coming from the everyday clutter of my living room, but the passage of time has given me a much-needed chance to reflect. First, my final movie. I'm happy to say that unlike last year, when I had to go looking for last-minute satisfaction outside the festival schedule (and found it with Half Nelson at a multiplex outside downtown), my Toronto Film Fest screenings this year ended on an up note with Ira Sachs' Married Life. Working from a script cowritten with Oren Moverman, already hot at TIFF this year for cowriting I'm Not There with Todd Haynes, Sachs crafts a period piece that has a good time with the audience's expectations. The set-up seems familiar: Married man Chris Cooper finds the much younger love of his life (Rachel McAdams), who his best friend (Pierce Brosnan) secretly covets, and to end his marriage without making his wife (Patricia Clarkson) suffer, Cooper's character decides the best thing to do is kill off the ol' ball and chain. But the film keeps you guessing happily as you take in the work of an across-the-board fine cast.
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