Scenes: I Stood Where Carey Mulligan Sang

This weekend I had the pleasure of attending a private party for Fox Searchlight's Shame after its New York Film Festival premiere held at the Top of the Standard. That's the bar atop the glassy luxury hotel that hovers in the sky over the immensely popular High Line (an elevated walkway over the meatpacking district). You read that the Top of the Standard (also known as the Boom Boom Room) is impossible to get into if you're not among the über famous or wealthy. I just walked up and said "Michael Fassbender's Party" and the doors parted. Amazing what a name can do.

Not mine, his! Don't misunderstand. I always feel as if there's been some mistake when I enter these moneyed settings as I'm just a poor boy from Detroit who loves the movies too much. Not that I don't welcome such beautiful mistakes. I know virtually no one so am happy to run into a friend from Movie|Line while I'm there and we catch up a bit.

Mostly I'm there to soak up the buzzy atmosphere since the film, despite the very typical backlash which followed the early Venice "Masterpiece!" shouting, has been well received. That's particularly true of Michael Fassbender and Carey Mulligan's performances, which snap electrically back and forth between frighteningly numb fleshiness and raw exposed nerves. I spot Fassy almost immediately several people away talking to executive types. He's all slim and handsome in a gray (?) suit but he looks substantially more human in person, almost civilian like, were it not for that sleek beanpole refinement. Another partygoer echoes my thoughts "Before you got here he was just standing outside smoking... like he was anybody else!"  

At one point John Cameron Mitchell is standing right behind me and though he's surrounded by friends and I have no idea what they're talking about I immediately presume (by which I mean pretend) that they're all discussing Shortbus (2006) since it's the last sexually explicit serious-minded English language movie I can think of before Shame. Elsewhere I see faces I can't quite place though I recognize them (character actors? industry players?) and one that I do, Brady Corbet. He's had such a steady career playing suspicious, damaged or dangerous types for everyone from von Trier to Araki through Michael Haneke and now Sean Durkin (Martha Marcy May Marlene -reviewed) that at first I am wary of his total friendliness. Nevertheless I have to take advantage and we chat for awhile. How soon did he know Martha would be special? He indicates immediately but when pressed for something more definitive about life on a film set -- how soon do you get a sense for what the finished film will be? -- he hesitates before settling on "two weeks." 

Nicole Beharie, on the other hand, who plays Fassy's would be girlfriend (and co-worker) in Shame didn't know what to expect at all. She had just seen her film for the first time that night. Turns out that she and Fassbender improvised a lot and since all three of her major scenes are actually single continuous shots (yay!), she had no idea which takes were chosen. I make a mental note to thank Steve McQueen for this as it is such an strangely rare treat to be able to watch two fine actors acting together rather than in their own disjointed closeups.

Carey Mulligan is absent.  "She's in Australia filming Gatsby" I'm told by the vivacious publicist who makes my night when she points out that we are mere feet away from the spot where Carey Mulligan sang in the movie. 

If u can make it there, u'll make it anywhere. come on come thru New York, New York ♫ 

If you haven't been following reviews, there's a key scene early in the movie where the Oscar-buzzing actress, playing Sissy the cabaret singer, does a rendition of "New York New York" that is both hauntingly real (her voice isn't perfect but emotive) and vaguely unreal (it's in the molasses phrasing and intense close-ups that aren't preferenced elsewhere in the film). The whole sequence might justifiably be read as a dream sequence, a psychic conversation, between sister Sissy and brother Brandon. The sequence has only two edits and thus three acts if you will, as it stares at Sissy then Brandon then Sissy again for wrap up.

Looking around I realize that The Standard is practically Shame Central... (though it'd surely be odd to advertise as such!) Two of its sex scenes were also quite obviously filmed there. It's the glass windows and the wrap around view that are dead giveaways.

Before leaving I chat briefly with Steve McQueen and narrowly resist the urge to bow down after years of worshipping his debut film Hunger though I can't help but praise him for his resistance to the boring unimaginative camera work that plagues even "master" directors when two characters converse. Rather than gushing any further, I thank him for not taking a million years off between film #1 and film #2 (a typically unfortunate habit of newbie directors). He's already working on film #3 he tells me called Twelve Years a Slave starring Chiwetel Ejiofor -- though what little he says about it he asks me not to print. Shame (no pun intended). His current pace is troubling him, he adds, because he also has his art career and his wife and kids who need more of his time.

I suppose we can allow him a break after film number three. As long as he keeps working...

Curio: Meryl, 30 Years Ago

Alexa here. Digging through my magazine collection (I'm not a hoarder, really) I came upon this Meryl Streep-covered issue of Rolling Stone from October 1981, back when Annie Leibovitz was photographing for the magazine, and when Meryl was promoting French Lieutenant's Woman.  She was a mere 32 years old then, younger than Kate Winslet is today.  There are a lot of choice bits in the interview inside, confirming again that she is just, well, the best and most endearing of them all.

On her method (or lack thereof):

I don't have any method. People who have est, or people who have other means of relaxation, feel sure they have 'The Way' tucked inside their scripts. I don't have that. I sort of go at everything from a different direction.

On fame:

Put yourself in this position. You're passing the newsstand at Fifty-seventh Street and Sixth Avenue, and there's your face on the cover of a magazine. And one week later, you're on the subway, and there's that cover, with your face, on the floor. Somebody's probably pissed on it. It's an immediate sense of recognition of what this is.

On having just starred in Alice in Concert, a musical version of Alice in Wonderland, at the Public Theater: 

I had just done three movies, and I needed to jump and leap and feel the way I see my little boy play. And I wanted to forget the way I look, to become un-self-conscious, to have that freedom children have when they're doing something in the middle of a room full of adults looking at them - and they just totally don't care. Sure, maybe I can go to an analyst to try not to be self-conscious, but it never occurred to me to do that.

On her choices:

This is a particularly unadventurous time intellectually and artistically, even in terms of entertainment. And I feel worried, because my livelihood is threatened because I'm not interested in doing most of the films that are being made. People think you make choices based on some array of characters that are placed in front of you. Well, it isn't that way. There are so few beautifully written scripts that if there's something with any promise, you latch on. You pay them to do it.

NYFF: "Hugo" A Work in Progress

The surprise screening of The New York Film Festival tonight was Martin Scorsese's Hugo, a 3D adaptation of the book The Invention of Hugo Cabret (a much better title for about a hundred reasons) which is about an orphan boy who inadvertently uncovers rich cinematic history while trying to repair a broken automatron that is his only cherished reminder of his father. Martin Scorsese introduced the film himself and seemed a bit embarrassed by the standing ovation before the screening. Perhaps he was thinking Calm down. What if you don't like it?!? 

Father and Son and Automatron in "Hugo"

Though you'll undoubtedly see several full reviews online tonight, we were given a finger wagging public reminder pre-screening that we weren't to do so. Scorsese warned us that the color correction was not finished, the score was a temporary rendition of the completed score which Howard Shore is currently recording, and some of the effects and the 3D still needed touching up. This was especially true of the opening pre-title segment which had a lot of computer graphics in lieu of actual people and objects. So absent an actual review, let it suffice to say that I was too caught up in it to take ANY notes (the only thing written on my pad is "still needs color cor..." yep, that's it!) and was very pleasantly surprised.  

Ben Kingsley as the mysterious Papa GeorgeI had found the trailer so manic and gimmicky that I assumed the film would be a noisy disaster but the completed -- excuse me, nearly completed -- movie is actually fairly gentle and lovely despite flirting with manic slapstick on a few occassions. Production designer and certain Oscar nominee (again) Dante Ferretti's clock motif on steroids should read garish since Hugo lives inside a train station which seems to house ten thousand of them, all of which he hand winds daily. Instead the sets feel like intricate beauties with tiny hand-crafted parts. The film is still settling in my mind and I heard everything from raves to loud but minor quibbling while briefly chatting with other moviegoers outside. But if you've ever loved France, Books, Fiddling With How Gadgets Work, or The History of Cinema, it's a love letter you'll most definitely want to read when it opens next month.

I Wanna Be Linked By You... Just You...

Self Styled Siren graphs a two line fever chart on My Week With Marilyn.
Guardian Great actress Olivia Williams (The Ghost Writer) on what she sees in the mirror. (It only makes us love her more.)
My Portis Wasp offers 8 reasons you should watch American Horror Story, the new series from Ryan Murphy (Glee, Nip/Tuck)
Low Resolution has issues with Lars von Trier's miserabilist smugness in Melancholia.
Fanboy Gamer [nsfw] a Rice Krispies Human Centipede.

Stale Popcorn nice piece on What's My Number? and Crazy, Stupid Love and the necessity of "charm" in the ever flailing rom-com genre.
La Daily Musto did you know these celebrities were only children?
Fandor starts a conversation about the Chicago International Film Festival. I hadn't even heard of this other Marilyn Monroe related picture Nobody Else But You.

Drive. I loved it so much I had to illustrate my review!

Finally, have you heard this dumbass story of a Michigan woman so upset about the misleading trailer for Drive that she filed a lawsuit?:

Drive bore very little similarity to a chase, or race action film ... having very little driving in the motion picture".

God, imagine what she must have thought of P.T. Anderson's There Will Be Blood ! If you ask me there's more than enough driving in Drive. There are three car chase scenes that are ALL better than about 30 years worth of other movie car chases and they're all in the same movie!  But, it's true that there's all that "European" movie around them. Critics love it. She thought it was shit. 

NYFF: "My Week With Marilyn"

Poor Marilyn. The press hounded her. Fans would tear off pieces of her soul if they could. Co-stars and directors dissed her. Men wouldn't leave her alone (not that she wanted them to). And now Simon Curtis is holding yet another Monroe seance -- her soul will never rest in peace -- with his feature film debut My Week With Marilyn (2011),  a "true" story about the making of The Prince and the Showgirl (1957).

True must come with quotes. The film is based on the memoirs of Colin Clark, the third assistant director on the "lightest of comedies" directed by and starring Sir Laurence Olivier (Kenneth Branagh) and Marilyn Monroe (Michelle Williams). Can we trust the awestruck account of a young movie dreamer's version of his friendship and quasi-romance with the world's most famous actress? My Week With Marilyn emphatically does despite the amusingly placcid (if repetitive) moonyness with which the talented Eddie Redmayne portrays him, as if he's just as doped up as Marilyn, but much smarter about his cocktails of choice.

"Surprise!" Marilyn escapes with Colin Clark, lowly third assistant directorClark was 23 going on 24 when he met the immortal bombshell while hustling into the movies, landing his first job on a set through the help of his father's connections, despite the fact that the father did not approve of him 'running off to the circus'. The details of Clark's adventure in the movies are both acted out and explained to us in voiceover in the film's inelegant screenplay, which prefers for the characters to state the obvious or speak their psychologies aloud. Sometimes they even speak Marilyn's aloud; in the great transitive powers of true celebrity, everyone on earth is her psycho-therapist. Sometimes this obviousness of speech has comic payoffs (the film works best as a comedic clash between proper British theatrical training and idiot-savant American stardom) and once it even pays off both dramatically and comedically in a sadly funny scene where Colin Clark tells it like it is, succinctly, to Marilyn. He understands Marilyn and Olivier's mirrored goals and prophesies the failure of the movie.

Thought Balloons as dialogue and Michelle's performance after the jump...

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