• Nailed, that David O. Russell film that keeps having to halt production because of THINKFilm’s financial troubles, has shut down for the fourth time. Meanwhile, yesterday THINK closed its Toronto office, which housed 25 employees as recently as the end of 2007. Randy Manis, VP of acquisitions and a co-founder of the company, is one Toronto-based exec cutting ties with the company;”It has not been the easiest time in the company with so many people we worked with wanting things,” he told Variety.
• The apparent unwatchability of Hancock is a big topic of conversation here in Los Angeles this week. Todd McCarthy at Variety is the first to go public with his distaste; he warns, “Although it will inevitably open very large, this odd and perplexing aspiring tentpole will provide a real test of Smith’s box office invincibility.”
• 96 countries have been sent entry forms for the Best Foreign Language Oscar nomination.
• X Files creator Chris Carter is apparently directing a secret movie starring David Cassidy’s daughter and rapper Xzibit. It may be secret for a reason.

This review first appeared in slightly different form during the 2007 Toronto Film Festival. Operation Filmmaker opens in New York tomorrow.

As a portrait of post-Sadaam Iraqi youth, Operation Filmmaker doesn’t have the “wow!” factor of another recently released movie about Iraqi kids looking for refuge in American popular culture. But for a film that began life as a vanity project designed to document an act of kindness on the part of a Hollywood star, it’s a surprisingly evocative examination of privileged, well-intentioned ignorance. That director Nina Davenport chooses to resolve the story on a pat, inappropriately jokey note is thus maybe a fitting way to end a story of conflict between the self-oblivious and a master manipulator, but it’s still a disappointment.

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I feel like in order to talk about Sex and the City in any depth more than I already have, I have to tell you a little something about my personal worldview, to explicate how it’s possible that a pushing-30 single gal living in New York could not only not identify with but actually feel hostile towards, as Susie Bright put it in an excellent piece in Salon, the “racket part of what once was recognizable as the sexual self-emancipation of the feminist movement.”

Fortunately for all of us, talking about my personal life on this blog is the last thing in the world I want to do. So, instead, I combed the panoply of reviews of and writings about film that have come online over the last week, in order to cull five different commonly-cited grounds for why this film is a toxic scourge on the entirety of the human race. Or maybe just not the best possible way to spend 2.5 hours.

1. The women aren’t attractive!

Proponents: Anthony Lane, Roger Ebert, Noah Forrest, Armond White, virtually every male blogger with aspirations to be Harry Knowles.

Representative Pullquote: “The most human character is Louise (Jennifer Hudson), who is still in her 20s and hasn’t learned to be a jaded consumerist caricature…Louise is warm and vulnerable and womanly, which does not describe any of the others.” — Ebert.

Who Says it Best: Lane, who hasn’t produced a review to gain this much traction in the blogosphere since his legendary pan of Revenge of the Sith. Still, it’s not so much what Lane says (he makes fun of not just the ladies’ thirst for expensive outfits but the outfits themselves, complaining that all four are “little better than also-rans” compared to Audrey Hepburn in Funny Face) as the illustration the New Yorker saw fit to attach to his review. A masterpiece of grotesque caricature, it’s the only piece of critique of the film that this self-professed third (or is it fourth?) wave feminist considers to be truly, maliciously misogynist.

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So often reviews of films like Iron Man, even positive ones, give you the sense that the critics are a bit embarrassed that they’re required to go through the motions of critiquing a Hollywood product for which financial success and pop cultural domination is a foregone conclusion. I’m the first to sympathize with the critical crisis of futility, but it baffles me that so many critics so blatantly suggest that it’s barely worth their time to decode and deconstruct the films that are going to be seen by the largest number of people. Check the qualifiers that get thrown around: “As big-budget comic book adaptations go…”; “works well enough as your standard comic-book blockbuster.” Read: “Giving this film the full strength of my critical acumen would be beneath me.”

So it’s no surprise that the strongest and most considered review of Iron Man that I’ve read comes from a blog. Though io9’s Charlie Jane Anders admits that Iron Man “is not exactly a perfect movie,” she carefully deconstructs its political slipperyness and “Cronenbergian body horror” before branding the film “the first comic-book movie that’s actually better than its source material.” Traditional critics bitch and moan that their reviews of “sure” blockbusters don’t matter, but when millions of consumers invest in a shared entertainment experience, film reviews transcend arts reporting and become anthropology. It’s always exciting to see someone take the responsibility of that anthropological study seriously.

An excerpt from Anders’ review after the jump; you can read the full thing here.

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Interesting. David Poland, who is not crazy about Iron Man (”I just wanted a character who actually dealt with the obvious demons that he overcomes… and not just another really, really cool suit of CG armor”) posits that the fact that other critics are crazy about the film (it’s currently at 86% on Rotten Tomatoes) might be a sign that it’s not going to connect with audiences:

This appears to be the Pass movie of the early summer for critics. Is it because of Downey or the middle-aged hero or talk about a huge opening or the use of the Middle East and the half-ass political arguments of the film that play out hypocritically but pay active lip service to liberals… I don’t know.

All I do know is that when film critics are the ones identifying with your superhero, you may be being successful with the wrong demo for mega-bucks… which is all the film producers wanted in the first place.

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Here are some quick reviews of two SDFF films that I watched via screeners before touching down in Denver, and the one film I managed to see in town before succumbing to jet lag/altitude exhaustion. Oddly and entirely accidentally, all three films have something to do with aging males and their identity crises.

Karl Rove, I Love You

A self-mocking psuedo-documentary from the mind of Dan Butler (a journeyman supporting actor best known for a recurring role on Frasier), Karl Rove, I Love You has far less to do with the titualar “ultimate supporting actor” than with the personal fallout of engagement in our super-polarized political culture. What begins as a documentary on Butler as the archetypical “invisible” character actor (he’s consistently compared to Philip Seymour Hoffman, only “less famous”) morphs into a document of Butler’s mid-life crisis passion project, a one man show designed to expose the world to the “Real” Karl Rove. Butler begins the project wanting to hit the Bush administration where it hurts, but slowly comes to empathise with Rove, turns his show into a mildly-satiric love-letter, and alienates his single-minded friends and collaborators in the process.

Not always laugh-out loud funny, but well-paced and consistently engaging, Karl Rove, I Love You uses the natural conflict between (pervasively and unquestioningly liberal, and largely openly gay) Hollywood and (socially conservative but morally ambiguous) Red State actors to explore how angry obsession can offer the same kind of madness, identity salvation and pure pleasure as romantic passion. But more interestingly, it’s also about breaking down a black-and-white cipher and finding a whole person. It always feels more like a sitcom than a credible documentary (and the last twenty minutes really push the limits of disbelief), but it’s just creepy enough to work.

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As political polemic and as entertainment, Robert Redford’s Lions for Lambs is mostly unsuccessful, but as a statement of purpose on behalf of its co-star and executive producer, Tom Cruise, it’s mildly fascinating. Through sheer force of star power, Cruise manages to temporarily hijack this lumpy lecture, and turn it into a battle cry against the corporate media that both built and destroyed him.

You probably don’t need to be reminded that Cruise has had a rough couple of years, culminating in the announcement in November 2006 that he and long-time producing partner Paula Wagner had signed a deal to resurrect MGM’s dormant United Artists. Some saw this as a savvy move for both Cruise and MGM: disappointing box office on Mission Impossible: 3 aside, there’s still no one on the planet with Cruise’s international name-and-face recognition, and as he proved with War of the Worlds, which made $65 million in its first weekend just a scant month after the couch jumping incident, the guy can open the right project regardless of what’s going on in his personal life. But skeptics (myself included) wondered if MGM was just throwing Cruise a bone—if they weren’t doing anything with UA anyway, was handing the brand over really a sure sign of confidence?

The guy had—has–something to prove. With his career at the crossroads, the choice of Lions For Lambs as the vehicle to drive him over the hump is not an immediately logical one. It’s worth noting that Cruise didn’t go looking for politically relevant story to tell—Redford signed on to direct the script, and then called Cruise, looking to cast him. And I may get permanently disinvited from Sundance for saying this, but I’m not sure if Redford fully knew what he was getting into.

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Three Variety writers have posted early reviews (in apparent defiance of Paramount’s review embargo, which was to extend until Monday) of There Will Be Blood. All three reviews are, essentially, positive, but they fall on three distinct points in terms of confidence in the film’s ability to reach an audience.

still from There Will Be Blood originally posted by Jeff Wells

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Almost two weeks ago, I posted the news that Brian DePalma canceled a press conference previously scheduled to coincide with a screening of Redacted at the New York Film Festival. NYFF’s press office has just sent out a press release announcing that, “by popular demand”, DePalma has agreed to the meet the press after all.

The press conference, rescheduled for Monday afternoon, should be particularly interesting in light of the fact that Redacted has been widely reviled by most of the New York press (myself included). In fact, the only local defender of the film that I can name off the top of my head is New York Magazine’s David Edelstein, who just this morning blogged about not being able to get a word in edgewise at Tuesday’s Todd Haynes event. I wonder: will the Redacted haters cancel their Columbus Day plans en masse in order to get all up in DePalma’s face, or will Edelstein have a much easier time getting his questions answered?

Todd Haynes’ I’m Not There is a postmortem–but of what, exactly? It opens with the examination of a corpse, played by Cate Blanchett; the press notes tell us we’re supposed to connect this image to Bob Dylan’s 1968 motorcycle accident, in which he almost died but didn’t, and after which he was allegedly never the same. So on some level, it’s a love letter to a dead man whose body is still with us-–although, at the press conference following the New York Film Festival screening of the film yesterday, Haynes kept referring to Dylan in the past tense, as though his own private Dylan was long gone and never to return–but it’s also a catalogue of various shards of the dead culture of the 1960s. It’s as vital as it sounds: like so many of Haynes’ films, it’s based on a provocative concept that plays in practice like a museum piece.

It’s a collage of personality impressions and visual styles. Grainy, fluttering black and white gives way to a bottle green landscape, spotted with the second best psychedelic lens flares of the NYFF thus far. The film’s hallucinatory logic seems at first to defy any kind of stricture, until the references start to stack up: visual quotations from Dylan album covers, The Beatles doing silent comedy, La Strada; actual, scripted quotations from at least two Godard films. Each of the six protagonists is a walking (though hardly living or breathing) quotation, a riff on a Dylan phase or personality thread. A young ruffian who uses poetry to deliver uncomfortable truths to The Man. A prepubescent compulsive liar. A misunderstood prophet who finds his true calling by turning to God. An aging cowboy in hiding, laying low in a town obsessed with Halloween. A bad actor who becomes a big star and neglects the woman he loves. A put-opon speed freak who uses pop music to deliver uncomfortable truths to The Man.

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At Hollywood Elsewhere, Jeff Wells has issued a plea for support of The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. The film is opening in New York, Los Angeles, Toronto and Austin this weekend, and Wells implies that a wider release relies on opening weekend numbers. “If you appreciate the importance of giving this awesome film a decent reception, you’ll clap your hands and arm-twist as many friends as you can between now and Friday into seeing it this weekend,” Wells writes.

Wells has never been shy about supporting his faves, but it still seems a little out of the ordinary to see any blogger trying to rally the troops around a star-anchored studio film. It’s not that I don’t relate: it felt distinctly strange to walk around Toronto and answer the question, “Seen anything good?” with a ringing endorsement of a $60 million picture starring the most famous father of four in America. I’m sure it was just an accident of scheduling, but Jesse James far surpassed any of the microbudget indie films that I saw at that festival (you can find my Toronto review of the film here).

So Jesse James has a lot of blog support. The weirder thing is, the case could be made that it actually needs it. As I see it, there are two major issues to content with. More after the jump.

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Via Nikki Finke comes word of The Projectionist, a new blog at NYMag.com by the print edition’s resident film critic, David Edelstein. Edelstein’s only been blogging for a couple of days, and already he’s dropped a bit of self-promotion, with this post inviting fans to join him for a special screening of Sideways tonight at a wine bar in Brooklyn. Edelstein will be introducing the film, and will apparently use the opportunity to air a grievance that has been collecting dust for nearly 3 years:

I especially want to talk about the movie because a certain powerful critic (I won’t name him, but two of his initials are “A” and “O”) wrote a cheap, sleazy, opportunistic, and altogether scurrilous column to the effect that the film was acclaimed as intensely as it was because critics tend to be, like Sideways’ protagonist, pudgy, elitist, misanthropic alcoholics with no lives and not the faintest hope of snaring a dishy blonde like Virginia Madsen. To which I say, “Yes, but …”

I’m no detective, but I’m fairly sure Edelstein is referring to this column, in which a NY Times writer fitting the coy description above cited Alexander Payne’s Oscar almost-was as “the most overrated film of [2004].” I, unfortunately, won’t be able to make it down to Brooklyn tonight to see if said mystery writer shows up to defend his three-year stale hyperbole, but if you make it down there, I’ll expect a full report. In any case: welcome to the blogosphere, David!

You can expect one more Toronto-related segment on next week’s FilmCouch, but until then, our coverage of the 2007 Toronto Film Festival is complete. Here’s a round-up of our reviews; all were contributed by Karina, except where otherwise noted.

Across the Universe: “The tween and teen girls fueling the success of High School Musical and Hairspray, who willingly ingest those god-awful Ford music videos on American Idol without understanding the relationship between content and commerce–they’re not going to care that Universe is “too literal”, and they’re definitely not going to shun it for being pretentious.”
Atonement:  “There are no direct parallels to contemporary conflicts in Atonement, only the very general nod to the ways in which large-scale wars fundamentally alter lives…by making a sweeping, war-torn love story that refuses to directly comment on contemporary events, in a roundabout way Joe Wright draws attention to the impossibility of wringing romantic propaganda out of Iraq.”

Operation Filmmaker: “Whether her subject is serious about the movie business or not, Davenport gives Muthana’s plight extra resonance by cross-cutting between footage of real, blood violence in Iraq, and scenes of Muthana on the fake blood-soaked set of Doom. Can you blame the guy for pulling out all the stops to stay in the realm where the piles of corpses are only make-believe?”

Nightwatching: “I absolutely loved the first 15 minutes of the film, in which Greenaway introduces us to Rembrandt, his somewhat fantastic home life, and his unconventional but deeply touching bond with his wife Saskia”

Control: “Anton Corbijn’s film smashes the music biopic mold by portraying the star at its center not as a mythological creature, but as a real-life, fucked-up kid in over his head.”

Heavy Metal in Baghdad: “It’s a film in which the people that we went over there ostensibly to liberate show and tell details that demonstrate the complete lack of freedom of a life lived “in between the terrorists and the troops.” It’s not just that the members of Acrassicauda have suffered a severe quality-of-life downgrade; it’s that their lives have become so brutal that they’ve resigned themselves to not caring whether or not they live or die.”

The Assassination of Jesse James By The Coward Robert Ford: “It’s likely the most “difficult” film produced with Hollywood money and starring an A-list star since Eyes Wide Shut. It demands repeat viewings, and as such, it’ll either be a massive commercial failure, or it’ll touch off a new wave of American cinephilia.”

Elizabeth: The Golden Age: “The film hits its absolute peak of absurdist pleasure with Elizabeth on that horse, and the rest plays out like the last 20 minutes of a Busby Berkeley film: with narrative and emotional stakes obliterated, we’re treated to a meaningless parade of CGI explosions and really, really cool headdresses.”

Juno: “Juno’s one truly revelatory element stems from screenwriter Diablo Cody’s apparent intention to have her title character serve, at least in part, as a device through which to examine the sexual desires of teenage girls.” [reviewed at Telluride]

I’m Not There: “I’ll admit, I’m a sucker for concept films (Memento: OMG, it’s backwards!), but this went way beyond that. Every scene is a delicious layer cake of cultural references and multiple meanings.” [reviewed by Kevin at Telluride]

The Savages: “It was a good decision on Jenkins’ part to not spend any time in flashbacks or expository dialogue about back story. She stays in the present and let’s the past way on Linney and Hoffman’s faces as they try to reconcile their guilt over caring for a father they’d rather just be dead.” [reviewed by Paul at Telluride]

Encounters at the End of the World: “He’s a funny narrator, not nearly so severe as in Grizzly Man. But it is Werner Herzog. So, although he’s funny, he’s constantly reminding us we’re all doomed.” [reviewed by Paul at Telluride]

Stephen Holden’s New York Times review of Quiet City is extremely favorable towards the film, and extremely skeptical of what he calls “the movie genre labeled mumblecore … a filmmaking sensibility, filtered through Jean-Luc Godard and John Cassavetes and distantly related to punk, with the spirit of defiance replaced by resignation to the art of diminished expectations.”

This would seem to stand in sharp contrast to Matt Zoller Seitz’ Hannah Takes the Stairs review of a week ago, which was lukewarm on the film itself (”snappy but unadventurous,” he called it), but generally enthusiastic about its place within an exciting wave of American independent film. Still, both critics say the party’s over. Seitz blames Hollywood for luring these artists away:

Hannah plays like an incidental swan song, a signpost marking the point when mumblecore became a nostalgic label rather than a present-tense cultural force, and its most acclaimed practitioners moved on to bigger things. Mr. Swanberg’s third movie is a graduation photo in motion: D.I.Y., class of ’07.

Holden, apparently less invested than part-time filmmaker Seitz in championing grassroots filmmaking on principle, blames the movies:

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