Not to be outdone by Megan Fox, Christian Bale was photographed on the set of David O. Russell’s The Fighter yesterday looking extremely thin. And unlike Ms. Fox, Bale doesn’t seem to have needed a corset (though who knows what’s under that striped shirt?). Of course, after the method actor’s appearances in The Machinist and Rescue Dawn, this physical transformation is pretty tame.
Yet that doesn’t mean the online media can’t describe him as looking “crack cocaine addicted,” as Just Jared did in its posting of the pics. What, no “bulimic Batman” jokes? Oh, I guess the drug reference is more appropriate to the film in question, as Bale will be portraying former boxer Dickie Eklund, who actually was addicted to crack.
Well, appropriateness or not, let’s crack [no pun intended] some jokes. Best zingers from the film blogs can be found after the jump:
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It was shut out of the Oscar race for Best Documentary Feature, but Blessed is the Match: The Life and Death of Hannah Senesh, now playing in New York City, could easily inspire a Hollywood film about the life of its heroic subject. And that dramatic version could potentially garner multiple Academy Award nominations. It wouldn’t be the first time a figure documented in a nonfiction film was later portrayed in an Oscar-nominated movie. In fact, one of this year’s Best Picture contenders, Milk, is almost like a remake of the 1984 Oscar-winning documentary The Times of Harvey Milk.
Actual dramatic remakes of documentaries include Werner Herzogs’ Rescue Dawn, which revisits the subject of his earlier nonfiction film Little Dieter Needs to Fly, Michael Caton-Jones’ Memphis Belle, which fictionalizes the story of William Wyler’s doc The Memphis Belle: A Story of a Flying Fortress, and Martin Bell’s American Heart, which is loosely based on one of the subjects of his Oscar-nominated doc Streetwise. Also, the upcoming HBO dramatic film Grey Gardens was inspired by the Maysles brothers’ doc of the same name, and Hollywood has toyed with or announced remakes of the films The King of Kong, Murderball, Bra Boys and Sherman’s March.
To carry on the tradition, we’ve selected nine nonfiction films in addition to Blessed is the Match that would make great dramatic features.
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The Hollywood Reporter has details on Werner Herzog’s next project. Funded by Focus Features and described as Herzog’s “biggest English-language costume drama in more than four decades as a filmmaker,” it’s an adaptation of a novel called The Piano Tuner. Set in Burma, it’s about “a man sent to a remote village in the late 1800s to repair an eccentric military man’s piano.”
Herzog has always alternated between drama and documentary, but each flit back and forth between genres has seemed more significant ever since Grizzly Man significantly upped his profile three years ago. Herzog’s last release, Rescue Dawn, made just $5.5 million in the States, which is nothing for a film starring Christian Bale but was still a significant increase over Grizzly’s $3.2 million. Focus Features + costume drama sounds like Oscar bait; I can’t wait to see what the Herzog spin on that formula looks like.
Last week, I wrote about Rescue Dawn: The Truth, a website where friends and family of Gene DeBruin, the character played by Jeremy Davies in Werner Herzog’s film, make the case that the director distorted the real life events at the Laotian prison camp in order to puff up the heroism of Dieter Dengler. Conservative bloggers and critics, who had initially praised the film for upholding American patriotic values, immediately turned on Herzog. They were particularly fired up by the claim that Herzog had been contacted by people close to DeBruin but had ignored their pleas to make changes to the film. In response to charges that DeBruin’s defenders were “blown off” by Herzog, Debbie Schlussel wrote, “Since Mr. Herzog would not tell the truth, I will.”
But over the weekend, I was listening to the August 3rd episode of Filmspotting, which features an interview with Herzog. This interview must have been recorded at least two weeks before Schlussel started the blog firestorm with her post, and in it Herzog voluntarily acknowledges the DeBruin camp’s unhappiness with his version of the story. Herzog concedes the discrepancy between his version and the family’s version, but says the Gene seen in Rescue is basically an exaggeration of certain character flaws related by Dengler to Herzog before Dengler’s death. Herzog’s basic attitude is, “I understand that they love Gene and want to think the best of him, but sometimes when men are put in extraordinary situations, they behave in ways that even the people closest to them wouldn’t expect.” You can listen to the podcast here.
This would seem to absolve Herzog of the charges of libel that were recklessly flying around the blogosphere last week. It’s not that he willfully mischaracterized DeBruin; the Herzog and the DeBruin camps simply have two different takes on the truth.
MGM’s decision to release Werner Herzog’s Rescue Dawn on July 4 was more than just a clever Transformers counter-programming gambit: it was an implicit attempt to mark the German director’s POW drama, a dramatic remake of his own documentary Little Dieter Needs To Fly, as a red state-targeted tribute to American patriotism. And to some extent, it worked: conservative film blog LIBERTAS called Rescue “a good old-fashioned patriotic war film”, but reserved their highest praise for the film’s director. “Herzog is a genius and a true iconoclast. He’s a rebel and a free-thinker. The lemmings desperate to be loved and fit in make the other kind of war film, the true counter-culture makes this kind.” And in blog post dated July 27, conservative commentator Debbie Schlussel named Rescue Dawn “the best movie of the year.”
Less than a month later, Schlussel has changed her tune considerably. In a post on her website dated August 16, Schlussel points to site called Rescue Dawn: The Truth, which claims that Herzog altered facts in Rescue Dawn in order to make Dieter Dengler appear to be more of a hero than he actually was. The site bears the signature of Pisidhi Indradat, who says he was imprisoned alongside Dengler but was omitted from Rescue Dawn; and Jerry DeBruin, brother of Gene DeBruin, who was played in the film by Jeremy Davies.
DeBruin and Indradat are primarily upset that Herzog gave the Dengler character the bulk of the credit for planning and executing the escape from Laos. They insist that, in real life, these plans were already in the hopper before Dengler ever got to the camp. In fact, they say they waited a few weeks to tell him about the escape because they didn’t know if they could trust a guy with a German accent. DeBruin is also angry at Herzog’s depiction of his brother as an antagonist to Dengler, played by Davies as a “deranged and derelict Charles Manson type entity.” Schlussel adds fuel to *that* fire by pointing out that Davies played Manson in a 2004 TV movie. It’s clearly a conspiracy!
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Origins of story: Interviewing Justin Evans about his new book soon to be a film, A Good and Happy Child. Rescue Dawn, Werner Herzog’s new movie opened this week starring Christian Bale. We interview actor Jeremy Davies and producer Harry Knapp. It’s the fictional portrayal of Dieter Dengler, the only man to escape a POW camp and be rescued during Vietnam. Herzog made a documentary on Dengler in 1997, Little Dieter Needs to Fly.
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Jeremy Davies is one of those actors whose talent is so abundant, but he isn’t a household name because his characters are so unmarketable. Co-starring in the new film, Rescue Dawn, he talks briefly about working with Werner Herzog and the real reason he’s been showing up recently in films by great directors.
Starz Denver Film Festival, spout.com podcast
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The legendary and enigmatic director, Werner Herzog, found a new collaborator for Rescue Dawn (2006) in producer, Harry Knapp. Knapp describes that collaboration with one word.
Brutal.
Starz Denver Film Festival, spout.com podcast
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Way back on Monday, we introduced our entry in the 
