Overheard: Children Will Listen

I was 20 minutes late to Rise of the Planet of the Apes this weekend (Didn't matter. Trailers were just ending) so everyone in line was buying tickets to or exiting from Captain America: The First Avenger. 

The good captain returns in THE AVENGERS (2012)Overheard:

Little Boy: [frustrated] The movie should have been 15 minutes longer! What happened in Times Square?
Dad: See, that's why they're making a sequel.
[Dramatic reassurance] It will be set in our time and it will be AWESOME!" 

Moviegoers have been trained so well and the indoctrination starts at birth. 

Seriously, Hollywood should stop wasting so much money on P&A. We've all been brainwashed to embrace the "see ya next time!" sequel culture.

Overheard at "The Tree of Life"

This weekend I was collecting tweets about things people have overheard at their screenings of Terrence Malick's mysterious artful epic The Tree of Life.

I kicked things off with two stories from my screening. The first was two very old ladies teetering out of the theater arm-in-arm.

Some of that was very moving... but most of it was very boring.

Next came a bored middle aged husband and his angry loud wife...

Wife: I couldn't wait for that to be over.
Husband: It was...long.
Wife: It was a DAY long. I couldn't take one more symbol, metaphor or paradox.

Mikhael joined my "overheard" enthusiasm, submitting the following from his screening:

Woody Allen look-a-like to his wife: So tell me what that was all about?

Will Holston heard this:

Old Lady Yelling: CAN ANYONE TELL ME WHAT THAT WAS ABOUT?

Jake Cole saw a hipster in a fedora with a Che t-shirt who was above it all.

It's not as smart as it thinks it is.

And finally Erin had a very boisterous crowd so I think she wins. She heard the following random snippets, all of them utterly hilarious if you've seen the movie.

There's no acting!

Are we in the right film?

Are those sunflowers?

[during last ten minutes] Is that SEAN PENN?!

None of these comments surprise me and all of them delight me because The Tree of Life is so meditative and personal and open to interpretation that anyone can probably feel anything while they're watching it. I imagine that people who don't like their mind to wander, to fill in, to have associative adventures both scary and peaceful and god-knows-what-else during a screening probably become utterly unhinged. I like that feeling in a movie theater but I was unnerved a couple of times by the barrage of things I was feeling and the distinct impression that the film wasn't trying to make me feel them exactly and maybe the film wasn't even responsible for me feeling them... which was both exciting and annoying.

I haven't talked about the movie at all here because i missed the first wave or critical discussion (I have yet to read even one review) and was totally shy thereafter. I mostly enjoyed it but for its repetitive preciousness about prayers to God and the Sean Penn sequences. But I think in some key ways it's the most inaccessible thing I've seen in theaters since Matthew Barney's 10 hour Cremaster cycle (which I was gaga for) so I'm perversely enjoying that some unsuspecting moviegoers are tricked into seeing it by Malick's reputation and the twin towers of stardom that are PITT and PENN.

To be frank I adamantly believe that Sean Penn was a financial compromise the movie shouldn't have made. This part, which should only be a vessel to provide the visual passing of time, needed a complete unknown. His star presence kept taking me out of the movie --  'Why is this big star Brad Pitt's angry son all grown up?' -- because Penn didn't have enough of a character to play to justify an "actor" playing it.  Every other cast member seemed to have been utterly absorbed into the film like they were just appendages or organs powered by its brain, blood and nervous system. Brad Pitt in particular was fantastically convincing and period specific as the frustrated father. Unlike Penn I never felt like I was seeing "Brad Pitt". I'll assume you've read a hundred times by now that the child performances were sensational examples of the kind of "naturalism" that most movies don't ever attempt. One scene in particular with the two eldest boys in tall grass, one of them crying, totally unnerved and upset me and it's my strongest memory of the movie. Well, aside from the bravura creation sequence. Those briefly glimpsed dinosaurs had more soul than any screen dinosaurs ever, yes?

YOUR TURN. Sorry it took me so long to say anything. How unruly was your audience and how conflicted was your own response to the year's most challenging movie to see regular release thus far?

It's All About the Shoes...

On Easter The Boyfriend and I had brunch with two of our favorite people and their daughters. Like so many other little girls (and boys), they love Disney Princess movies so I had to ask the eldest, who is suddenly chatty, which was her favorite? The question rendered her completely shy, like nobody had ever asked her to embrace her inner film critic (though I find this hard to believe since her dad is a huge movie buff and awesome enough to school me on occassion). I had given up hope of an answer, reverting my attention to the food when she shouted "CINDERELLA" at the top of her lungs over her waffles. "But why" I say? This answer came much more swiftly, like it was the silliest question any adult had ever asked her.

The glass slippers.

She didn't add "duh" but it was right there, loud and clear, in her squeal of laughter.

Nashville Pt. 2: Mardi Gras, "Normal" Movies, Dan Butler

Crap. I spilled glitter on the logo again!After the arriving excitement covered in Part One, it was down to watching movies. I started with a few documentaries: One Lucky Elephant and Project NIM (both of which I'll talk about tomorrow) and Sons of Tennessee Williams which is an intriguing and entertaining documentary on a very early pre-Stonewall civil rights victory for gays. And in the South no less! The film is primarily focused on the tradition of Mardi Gras costume balls. Maybe it could have used more thematic organization or stricter editing but the footage and wealth of old photographs are goldmine finds and really fill out the fascinating stories and interviews with living witnesses. The takeaway is pretty spot on -- we all ready need to be aware of history and stop getting complacent about hard-won civil rights. It can all be taken away from you.  I have a feeling this film will stick in the head, lingering like glitter. Have you ever used the stuff? You find that shit ev-er-y-where for months afterwards, nay, years! You find it in the weirdest places. It won't go away so thankfully it's shiny and pretty.

While I was waiting in the queue for the first documentary, a gaggle of noisy teenage and tweenage girls walked by en masse and two older female festival patrons behind me stared at them.

Woman #1: [confused] I don't understand what film they were here to see.
Woman #2: [matter of fact] It must have been a normal movie.

Normal. Hee. Festival movies are abnormal you see! Or maybe it's just that they're "films" as opposed to movies...  it struck me as funny until I realized that I also see unnormal movies at festivals. Which is to say that my normal movie-diet does not include much in the way of non-fiction but at festivals I seem to always be sticking my toes into documentary waters (they're generally warm and inviting, these metaphorical pools). I choose mostly on subject/story as I suspect regular moviegoers do at the box office which is probably why I should be less judgmental of "civilians" who rarely think about the man artists behind the curtain. "They" don't even seem to choose based on stars they love else films like Blue Valentine with Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams would be major hits because who doesn't love those two actors? Speaking of Ryan Gosling...

Industry Chat
One of my fellow jurors is Dan Butler, the actor. I've met him before at a previous festival when he was promoting his mockumentary Karl Rove, I Love You (2007). You might remember him as "Bulldog" from Frasier or as one of the geeky entomologists in The Silence of the Lambs [weird trivia note: He's also in Manhunter albeit as a different character so I think he's the only actor to appear in both of the first two Hannibal Lecter pictures?]. We had several opportunities to chat since we're jurying but I had to congratulate him on getting the Crazy Stupid Love gig.

Amy heard you crying in the bathroom. We all thought it was cancer.

He even gets a big joke in the trailer. I asked him if he knew he was going to be in the trailer but he had no idea until it came out. But he knew the scene "played," as they say, and it's one of the first big laughs in the movie. We talked about Ryan Gosling. "Sweet" and "talented" were the adjectives of choice. Of course we all knew about the talented part but it's good to hear that he's a nice guy, too. Dan plays "Cal's Boss", Cal being Steve Carrel. I told him I had looked up his "name" on IMDb.  He joked that character actors get very excited when they get roles with both first and last names because usually you get a first name or a last name or job title in this case. He obviously loved the part and said he had a great albeit very short time on the set of the star-studded comedy. Get this. He had to fly in to LA right after a performance Off Broadway, film this scene in the movie and fly right back to NYC to return to the play. I thought it sounded exhausting but he only had to miss one matinee performance for the filming. Dedication!

Showbiz people log many frequently flier miles. Perhaps that's one reason Up in the Air played so well with the Academy?

Nathaniel in Nashville Pt. 1

I thought I'd share a few of my adventures at the Nashville Film Festival whilst practicing on my wacom tablet -- so hard to get the hang of this, the wacom not the Nashville. (I've been to the Nashville Festival a couple of times so I think I have the hang of it now.) I arrived in my Herzog tee -- I always live in mortal fear that some Herzog freak will grill me about good ol' Werner since I probably don't know as much about him as I should given the human advertisement aspects of t-shirt wearing. My favorites are Grizzly Man and Aguirre the Wrath of God and Nosferatu but Werner is prolific so I can't say I've seen everything.

The jurors and guests of the festival stay in downtown Nashville where you can get to the touristy parts quick but the festival is actually at a multiplex called Regal Green Hill...(update:  but I'm hearing from Mark in the comments that this is not the same thing as Green Hills. What do I know? I live in NYC and never drive and am losing my spatial relations skills)  Nice theater with lots of screens. They shuttle you back and forth so as I'm waiting for the morning shuttle I am scribbling away at you.

Last night riding from hotel to festival I ended up in a van of fellow jurors, though none from my category. I was  happily chatting away with the guy in front of me when I suddenly realized Who He Was. It was Jamie Travis, a filmmaker I am so enthralled by -- the Patterns trilogy is genius --that I'm just grateful his back was turned and he didn't see my insta-tranformation into scary obsessive superfan.

It reminded me of my very first Life Drawing class in college where I was just randomly talking to the new kid in class. We're chatting for like 5 minutes and then the teacher walks in and new kid just stands up and starts taking his clothes off. (Was it something I said?) Turns out new kid was the nude model and suddenly I went from gregarious to totally awkward / speechless. It was kinda like that except for that nobody got naked.

In reality I'm sure I kept babbling but my sentences probably made less sense.

Celebrity Sightings
Some country music stars were doing the carpet but I never know who they are. I did gaze at Kris Kristofferson and Emmylou Harris chatting up TV crews on the red carpet for awhile though. The carpet had been mostly shoved into the VIP tent instead of outside where it usually is (very stormy and wet night).

Kristofferson had just received a career prize at the screening of his new movie Bloodworth. I arrived too late to see it but I heard from my driver Elaine -- a lovely retired woman volunteering at the fest -- that it was good and she was just raving about W. Earl Brown, who plays one of his sons in the movie.

I give it a 4.3 out of 5. "Brady" is Academy Award material!

Val Kilmer and Dwight Yoakam are also in the movie but it turns out that this W Earl Brown also wrote the movie and was smart enough to give himself a great part.

I couldn't quite make out why Emmylou was with Kristofferson (she's not in the cast list of the movie) but she looked eerily ageless. She just turned 64 and her silver locks -- clearly not a wig -- are so thick and lustrous you'd think she was 30 or 40 but for the silver.

Okay, back to the festival with me. Ciao.