Being that it’s at once an embarrassing failure and an unignorable success, it’s a bit of a shock that Sam Mendes’ Revolutionary Road has thus far been received with fewer vitriolic open letters and impassioned defenses than shrugs of measured praise. Certainly the best work Mendes has ever produced for the screen, Revolutionary Road works (on the level that it does work) as a showcase for performances: big stars Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet are probably at the top of their game, a star-making performance is registered in less than a handful of scenes from Michael Shannon, and, in the ultimate nagging old lady role, Kathy Bates reminds us why she is the greatest living nagging old lady in all of cinema. That all of this talent is put to the service of an adaptation which fundamentally bastardizes the main project of Richard Yates’ novel and neuters its cruel vision of the inability of the individual to grapple with his/her own soul sickness without projecting toxicity outward, doesn’t diminish the actors’ achievements, but it does force us to question whether masterworks of the literary form should be adapted into prospective Oscar cash-ins to begin with, if it means necessarily stripping said masterworks of the daring that makes them masterful.
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After making a big splash at Sundance several years ago with his hysterical short Windowbreaker, the incredibly prolific and versatile Tze Chun, who in the five years since graduating from Columbia’s undergrad Film Studies program in 02′ has made a whopping 12 low budget short films, will be back in Park City this year with his debut feature, Children of Invention. A feature length version of Windowbreaker, it follows two young Asian children living illegally in a model apartment who are left to fend for themselves when their hardworking mother disappears. We caught up with Tze (pronounced “Z”) to discuss his adoration for inappropriately long Charlie Kaufman interviews, his desire to adapt portions of Virginia Woolf and in what capacity Richard Kern and Britney Spear might become friends. …Read more
In her Variety column today, Anne Thompson contrasts Sam Mendes’ star-studded, Oscar-positioned, somewhat tonally revisionist adaptation of Revolutionary Road with the work and life of author Richard Yates. Thompson reminds what unlikely source material this is for a re-teaming of the beautiful young stars of the highest grossing film of all time, relating in detail the plight of “the long-suffering Yates,” who lived in “squalid” solitude, never sold more than 12,000 copies of a single novel, and hated the only produced film his writing ever had anything to do with.
In his day, Yates was asked by its editor to stop submitting fiction to the New Yorker, a publication which had no use for the writer’s “mean-spirited view of things.” In describing how Mendes and crew revised the material to make its protagonists “warmer and more sympathetic” (and chose to take their dreams seriously where Yates drily mocked and criticized), Thompson implies that Hollywood has no use for the acid element of Yates’ view, either.
As you can see above, Floridian turned Brooklynite Holly Herrick knows a thing or two about flowers, but this is just where her expertise begins. The programmer of Sarasota’s quickly emerging film festival has taken up programming duties at the Hamptons Film Festival, which kicks off on Wednesday. We spoke recently about why Agnes Varda’s new film shook her up, the new record from The Walkmen and why she’s looking forward to Examined Life so much. …Read more
Michael Tully does alittle bit of everything. He’s a musician. Journo/blogger/critic. Oh, and he’s directed a pair of acclaimed films, the down and out on drugs in Jacksonville narrative Cocaine Angel and the David Berman rock doc Silver Jew, which will be released on DVD next week by Drag City. Michael is currently the editor of the indie film criticism blog Hammer to Nail, creator of indiewire’s Boredom and Its Boredest blog and occasional contributor to Spout and Filmmaker Magazine. Here’s his take on why The Wire is our young century’s greatest artwork, what’s so special about Max Richter and just how tough it is to get the rights to Richard Yates stories. …Read more
