If you can imagine Tilda Swinton in Beyond the Forrest-Bette Davis mode, playing the Bogart part (ie: an unapologetic drunk whose law evasion comes full circle to heroism) in a present-day border-crossing noir that slowly transforms into a fear-of-difference mother melodrama after an unintentional detour to Tijuana, then you’re some way towards being able to wrap your head around Erick Zonca’s Julia, opening this Friday a year-plus after its world premiere in 2008 at Berlin. Swinton plays the titular far-gone drunk, a tough broad past her prime but able to turn on what’s left of her charm when circumstances demand it. Within ten minutes of meeting Julia, we watch her lose her job at a real estate office thanks to “a drink … or two … at lunch”, and continue to booze her way into a number of compromising positions, each one leaving her further dependent on the kindness of the various strangers who are in the vicinity when she comes to. Most don’t exhibit any, which might be one reason why Julia has become convinced that she’s a victim of a cruel world and not her own bad habits.
Tilda Swinton doesn’t have a co-writing credit on Jim Jarmusch’s The Limits of Control(which triumphed over dismissive reviews to top the speciality box office over the weekend), but maybe she should. According to an interview with the actress in Movieline, Jarmusch cribbed one of the film’s most memorable (and self-reflexive) monologues, in which Swinton muses that “Movies are like dreams you’re never really sure you’ve had; sometimes my favorite films are the ones where people sit there and don’t say anything,” from a State of Cinema speech Swinton gave at the San Francisco Film Festival in 2006. That speech, which was structured as a letter to Swinton’s young son, after he wondered “what people’s dreams were like before the cinema was invented”, is online at SF360.
It’s hard to know how to go about using words to do justice to Jim Jarmusch’s The Limits of Control, a film seemingly designed to reveal the folly of associating language with meaning, so concerned it is with the rhythm and atmosphere of code over courting traditional satisfaction by suggesting conceivable systems for breaking it. In talking about a picture in which everything is surface (or else nothing is), and the relationship between all signs and their meanings are scrambled (or none are), is everything a spoiler? (Or, perhaps nothing is?)
It’s possible that you’re frustrated already, and you wouldn’t be the only one; Jarmusch’s film is the first to be released this calendar year to truly polarize critics to the point where some of my colleagues have suggested that it’s one of the filmmaker’s worst efforts, while others champion it as one of his best. As such, it seems necessary to be more transparently subjective than usual: I like it. The Limits of Control seems to work best for those who can roll with the fact that Jarmusch is trafficking in vague genre promises that he only barely cashes in on, and that the story’s perceived mystery is a MacGuffin to pave the way for a rumination on creative idealism as a code that crosses transnational lines, bridging gaps of language and ethnic difference to unite dreamers/travelers (signified here as one and the same) in a common fight against those who seek to destroy their philosophy in the name of global capitalist homogeneity.
“What is indie cinema?” asks Richard Vine at The Guardian. He runs though a brief history of Indiewood, notes that the London Film Festival put Azazel Jacobs, Barry Jenkins and Joe Swanberg on a panel promoting a new wave of truly independent filmmaking, and then rhetorically wonders if his initial question is irrelevant:
But is indie a meaningful term anymore, or is it just shorthand for “cool”, “edgy” or “offbeat”? Does it matter if the so-called faux-indie production methods result in decent films such as Juno and Little Miss Sunshine that play at easy-to-access multiplexes alongside the CGI sequels and threequels?
To answer the three questions posed in the above paragraph: Yes, no, yes. What follows is essentially the same argument I’ve made one thousand times over the past three years, but apparently there are still some people who need to hear it.
Tilda Swinton has made a career out of playing interesting characters, although her shrewish portrayal of Katie Cox in Burn After Reading probably won’t endear her to many. She plays the epitome of a controlling woman who has her CIA husband Osborne Cox (John Malkovich) sandwiched squarely under her thumb. Or there could be a cadre of career-minded women out there who’d want to use her as a role model, I’m not sure.
The film has been getting mixed reviews ever since its debut at the Venice Film Festival, although they all seem to laud the performances. Swinton performs adequately enough in the film, but she isn’t given much to do, and seeing her with George Clooney just makes me want to watch Michael Clayton all over again. I might even have to pull Orlando off the shelf and watch it again as well.
Find out what she had to say about working with the Coens, going up against Brad Pitt’s blonde hair, and what winning the Oscar did, or rather didn’t, for her career. It’s all waiting after the break.
Although Joel and Ethan Coen have been busy in Toronto talking about their newest film Burn After Reading, which opens tomorrow, last weekend the buzz around town was all about small crowds gathering at hotel entrances hoping for a glimpse of Brad Pitt. He definitely steals the movie, which is hard to do considering some of the talent that’s stacked up in this film.
On that note, I’ve gone back and forth on this movie in my own head. At first I didn’t care for it, then I kept thinking about the performances and realizing how good some of them are. George Clooney’s Harry Pfarrer is actually a pretty decent character, especially when he gets paired onscreen with Frances McDormand. Their dinner scene together works with a bit of Cary Grant / Katherine Hepburn spark.
However, despite the strong performances throughout the film, the plot drags on and by the time you come to the end, you find yourself thinking “Is that it?” When the writer and director end up being the same person, there’s not really anyone else you can fault for the final product. Miller’s Crossing is one of my top five films, and I never get tired of The Hudsucker Proxy or The Big Lebowski. Unfortunately Burn After Reading represents, for me, a misstep for the Brothers Coen. Read on to find out what they had to say about the film, winning the Oscar, and an Easter egg hidden on the Fargo soundtrack.
From its crash and burn debut at the Venice Film Festival to its slightly more positive but still definitively mixed reception here at the Toronto Film Festival, people who like to spend a lot of time bitching have spent a lot of time bitching that the CoenBrothers‘ Burn After Reading is at the very least a “disappointment” as a follow-up to No Country For Old Men, and is maybe even Exhibit A to the charge that this is a disastrous year for American pseudo-indie film. The former might be true, if one was of the mind that No Country as a masterpiece … which I was not. The latter might be true, if one was of the mind that a star-studded festival entry with little to no chance of impressing the stodgy middlebrow fetishists of the obvious of the Academy is synonymous with failure…which I am not. Burn After Reading may not have the sparse majesty of No Country––it may not go out of its way to tell you that We Are Getting Deep Up In Here––but in its own way its even more brutal assignation of moral confusion.
Via CNN via Anne Thompson comes the full lineup for The Ballerina Ballroom Cinema of Dreams, the film festival thrown by recent Oscar winner Tilda Swinton and guest programmed by her and Joel Coen, starting this Friday in “Nairn in the North East of Scotland, a seaside town where Chaplin used to holiday and which has a balmy microclimate and vistas across the Moray Firth to the Black Isle, Cromarty and Sutherland.”
If you think that’s a lot to swallow, look at the line-up. Busby Berkeley’s Dames! Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant! Stuff by David Lynch and Roman Polanski, world premieres, an entire day devoted to singing! And, a mandate that the audience make a lot of noise at the end of each film. From the Ballerina website’s News page:
At the Guardian, Andrew Pulver laments the fall Derek Jarman (and the personal, high-art cinema he made and represented) from cinephile fashion. He blames this in part on the revival of the commercial British film industry:
One problem is the seismic shift of the cinematic landscape since Jarman’s death in 1994, the same year that saw the release of Four Weddings and a Funeral. One of Jarman’s main weapons had been that, in the Thatcher era, there was no one else putting out Britain-centred product so enthusiastically. His small-scale, personalised vision undoubtedly helped him survive the 1980s and, to some extent, prosper. But with the revival of the commercial end of the British film industry, the very people who most resented Jarman’s productivity regained the initiative. After his death, his cinematic influence virtually vanished.
The idea of Jarman as a “Britain-centred” filmmaker reminded me of one of the things I found most frustrating about Derek, Isaac Julien and Tilda Swinton’s collaborative, impressionist doc on their late friend, which I saw at Sundance last month (Pulver mentions both Julien and Swinton but not the film, although I have to imagine this post was in part motivated by Derek’s premiere this week in Berlin).
Anthony Kaufman investigates the “little mini-studio” of producer Paul Mezey, the man behind a host of notable recent indies, including Sugar and Momma’s Man. What’s Mezey’s secret? Location. Says the Pennsylvania-based producer, “I would have sunk long ago if I had to raise a family in New York.”
Lady Wakasa informs us that the Film Society of Lincoln Center will be screening a new print of one of Louise Brooks’ early films, Beggars of Life.
This is where we start getting smutty: Tilda Swinton took her 29-year-old boyfriend to the BAFTAs whilst “68-year-old John Byrne, her partner of 18 years, stayed at home in the north of Scotland, looking after the couple’s ten-year-old twins Xavier and Honor.” Why can’t she have a reality show?
Finally, “in honor of Valentine’s Day,” i09 has “started asking random people to tell us about their science fiction sex experiences.” I guess I’ve never had a “science fiction sex experience”, because I have no idea what that means.
Michael Clayton shows on Oct. 8 at 7 p.m. at AMC River East as part of the 2007 Chicago International Film Festival. This review was first published on HollywoodChicago.com.
CHICAGO – Don’t be fooled by its formulaic, Hollywoodspeak tagline.
“The truth can be adjusted” is the Michael Clayton way of saying this film has rammed in a whole hell of a lot more than you might first presume and is about to blindside you with everything a picture-perfect Hollywood product should be.
George Clooney in Michael Clayton.
Photo courtesy of IMDb
An opulent, all-star cast as in The Departed sometimes yields the film of the year. At other times, the failure of that resolve can make financiers suicidal.
In the case of Michael Clayton, writer/director Tony Gilroy weaves the commanding George Clooney, flawlessly fanatical (and sometimes streaking) Tom Wilkinson, tautly corporate Tilda Swinton and the always-on-top-of-his-game Sydney Pollack into a film that pays its weight in gold.
We’ve had a bit of trouble getting this episode to go through the iTunes feed, so we hope this re-post will fix the problem. The original post, with episode description and embedded player, is here.
filmcouch-114
Tilda Swinton doesn’t have a co-writing credit on Jim Jarmusch’s The Limits of Control (which triumphed over dismissive reviews to top the speciality box office over the weekend), but maybe she should. According to an interview with the actress in Movieline, Jarmusch cribbed one of the film’s most memorable (and self-reflexive) monologues, in which Swinton muses that “Movies are like dreams you’re never really sure you’ve had; sometimes my favorite films are the ones where people sit there and don’t say anything,” from a State of Cinema speech Swinton gave at the San Francisco Film Festival in 2006. That speech, which was structured as a letter to Swinton’s young son, after he wondered “what people’s dreams were like before the cinema was invented”, is online at SF360.
“What is indie cinema?” asks 
Anthony Kaufman
CHICAGO – Don’t be fooled by its formulaic, Hollywoodspeak tagline.
