Movie Nation

Here’s a modest and modestly effective Italian thriller with a supernatural twist.

Continue reading →

In the months after the zombie apocalypse, brought on by a virulent mutation of Mad Cow Disease, America has ceased to be.

Continue reading →

Naomi Watts was in Los Angeles, on a break while filming “King Kong,” when it happened.

“I was glued to the TV, watching in shock and horror,” she says. When George Clooney called for her help with a TV benefit for the victims, she was there.

Director Juan Antonio Bayona (“The Orphanage”) was home in Spain, “having Christmas with my family,” when word of the tsunami of 2004 arrived. He too, felt the horror, images that he says he could not shake from his memory. And when he heard one family’s story of their experience in Thailand, he became a movie maker with a mission.

“I don’t know how, and I don’t know why, but the moment I heard this story it spoke to me in this very direct way,” he says. “It turned into an obsession for me.”

Bayona’s obsession was to make a movie about the catastrophe, personalizing, telling one family’s true story of tragedy and triumph. “My intention was to show what the news could not — to empathize with these characters, to personalize it by limiting the point of view to only what they saw and knew and when they knew it. I wanted an emotional experience, an emotional journey, not an intellectual one. The tragedy happened so fast, in so few hours, that even those living through it did not have time to think about it. So it had to be very emotional.”

And to get that emotion across, to film “The Impossible,” as his movie was titled, he needed Naomi Watts to play the badly injured mother, trying to take care of herself and her son, not knowing if her husband (Ewan McGregor) and other sons survived the disaster.

“She has a natural instinct for tragedy, a gift for playing tragic women,” Bayona says. The actress “has few equals at conveying physical and emotional extremis,” Justin Chang wrote in “Variety,” where he praised “The Impossible” (opening Dec. 21) as “emotional” and “the most harrowing disaster movie in many a moon.”

The movie-star-gorgeous Watts, 44, would have to cast aside any thoughts of the glamorous world she travels in, and the vanity that draws so many to acting.

“There is a time and a place for vanity, and I knew that by the fifth page of the script that this was NOT going to be that film,” she says. “I welcomed letting go, having the wear almost no clothes — blood and wounds and scratches and dirt and very bad hair days. You can’t be thinking, ‘We must put the wound over here because that highlights my cheekbones’ This is not that film.”

What Maria, her character, offered, was the chance to play a heroine with conflicting agendas. She is a woman, clinging to life, a mother, struggling to live long enough to see that her son is safe, a woman who must put aside the grief for her missing family and her fear for her own life and pass along one last life lesson on to her son.

“She is a hero in the truest sense,” Watts marvels. “What surprised me was how she took everything down to the purest instinct of herself. Her priorities got into alignment, and she was very sure of every decision she took. Every moment, she was utterly in the here and now. It’s fascinating, the way she was able to access that clarity, that purity of purpose, when she needed it. She trusted her instincts every time she had to make a decision.

“She couldn’t live beyond that space she was in. Her other kids are probably dead? Her husband too? For her, and her son, that wasn’t their story in this moment. It was in them. They realized it. But they couldn’t go there. If they do, they’re weakening themselves and reducing their chances of survival. She needed to survive and needed her son to survive.

“I don’t think we have that kind of clarity in our lives – EVER.”

Bayona can’t help getting choked up when he recalls Watts in her most wrenching moments, a “woman who has to decide, moment by moment, as she is dying, what would be her last act in her life, what she would teach her son. What she chose was a lesson in humanity, that as dire as their situation is, they must take a moment to try and rescue this other kid. I think that lifted her in her son’s eyes, and in the audiences, to the level of hero.”

He set out to tell one family’s story of survival on an epic canvas, a movie that would require vast, devastated sets and convincing special effects. But what Bayona was left with, after doing all the research, was a renewed faith in humanity, something he decided that “The Impossible” must show.

“The most beautiful ideas that emerged from our research had to do with how kind people were,” he says, getting emotional again. “People who had lost everything were the most giving. It’s a difficult film, with some very uncomfortable images, but I hope it is a very positive way of seeing humanity. The tsunami was awful, but people’s response to it was gentle and full of kindness.”

(Review of “The Impossible,” the best picture of 2012)

Let’s call it “The Year in Stinkers.” Though we could say that about the worst of the worst in any given year at the movies. Statistically, Hollywood has an easy time of it, making hundreds of films, of which scores are bad movies, some filmed with the best of intentions.

But was there ever a collection of four cinema seasons as fraught with cynicism as 2012?

There was Fox, milking “Taken” by unleashing “Taken Again” – or “Taken 2.” How DOES a smart, tough cookie like Liam Neeson let himself and his wife get taken, after his daughter was taken?

“I need you to FOCUS.”

Sony topped that by re-booting the “Spider-Man” franchise before the final check to Sam Raimi, Tobey and Kirsten had cleared.

And Warners one-upped them all by turning “The Hobbit” — at best, a two hour and 10 minute movie — into a toy tie-ins galore “epic” trilogy of 3D films reaching maybe eight hours in length. Hobbits, it turns out, are no longer light on their furry feet. They’re plodders. It’s a New Zealand make-work project for Peter Jackson & Co.

Fanboydom begged for an “Alien” prequel from Ridley Scott, and “Prometheus” sullied his name. Another “Bourne,” without Bourne? The world didn’t need another “Men in Black” movie, though Josh Brolin channeling Tommy Lee Jones was fun. We’re a decade past the expiration date on “American Pie,” but here was “American Reunion,” and not straight-to-video, where it belongs.

The only thing a new “Total Recall” with Colin Farrell did was make us misty-eyed for the emotive stylings of the not-late/not-great Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Terence Davies revived Terence Ratigan’s dated play, “Deep Blue Sea,” and didn’t bother to shake off the mothballs.

It wasn’t cynical of Katherine Heigl to try and break her stinker-streak with “One for the Money.” It was desperation. And it didn’t.

Is there anybody in his small circle with the guts to tell Woody Allen that he needs to get off that treadmill, that if he wants to take an Italian vacation, he doesn’t need to whip up a bad movie (“To Rome With Love”) to cover the costs?

Lee Daniels’ “Precious” felt like a fluke when it came out. Too bad Nicole Kidman didn’t realize that before humiliating herself in “The Paperboy.”

Love Karl Urban. Hated “Dredd 3D.” Hate the sin, love the sinner.

And aren’t Kate Beckinsale and Mila Jovovich’s kids through college yet? Surely that was the last justification, in our mind and theirs, for any more “Resident Evils” or “Underworlds.”

Eddie Murphy revived the “Eddie’s Over” talk with “A Thousand Words.” In which he didn’t talk. Much.

And last and least, Adam Sandler spent the year passing his fart-joke torch fellow “Saturday Night Live” alumnus Andy Samberg. “That’s My Boy” and “Hotel Transylvania” made that seem like putting your athlete’s foot in your will.

I’ve had my share of film classes, seen more than my share of History of Film documentaries, own a pretty generous collection of history of film books, but I cannot recall ever seeing the first-ever “closeup” in a movie, the first uses of parallel structure editing.

It has been years and years since I’ve seen Japanese silent films, or the silent Danish witch movie “Haxan” that gave its name to Haxan Films, the folks who made “The Blair Witch Project.”

This 15 episode British series, narrated by writer/historian Mark Cousins, has all that and more, a detailed alternative to the quick summary histories of film that lean too heavily on D.W. Griffith, “the Studio System” and the like. It’s a multi-cultural cosmopolitan film history, ranging from Brazil to pre-WWII China, encapsulating every important innovator and innovation in cinema language in between.

It’s mesmerizing, filled with visits to the graves of filmmakers, with snippets of interviews, with modern day shots of the famous locations that are in such films at “L’Atalante” and “Saboteur.”

Great stuff for a movie buff, a real fill-in-the-blanks (not complete films, mind you, just snippets that remind you, “Oh yeah, OZU”) film lover’s guide to the evolution of the language of screen images. Now on Netflix Streaming.

When his “Sopranos” boss David Chase asked James Gandolfini to play another New Jersey Italian for his movie, a working class dad unhappy with his musician-son’s career choice in the swinging ‘60s, the big man didn’t hesitate.

“I knew this guy,” Gandolfini says. “There’s a lot of my dad in him.”

Pasquale, his character in “Not Fade Away,” is a gruff mechanic who runs a local Pep Boys auto repair shop. He’s pushing his son (John Magaro) to go to college. He doesn’t approve of the kid’s music, his long hair, his crazy clothes.

“You look like you just got offa the boat,” Pasquale — he goes by the assimilated name “Pat” — bellows.

“I heard that from my parents,” Gandolfini says. The child of first-generation Italian immigrants who grew up in the ‘60s and 70s, “My mother used to say, in her thick Italian accent, ‘You look like Professor COR-ey!’ Remember (TV comic) Professor Irwin Corey? With the wild hair all over the place, and the long baggy coat? I got a LOT of that.”

That upbringing informs his father figure in “Not Fade Away,” in combative scenes that highlight the generation gap between Depression survivors and kids indulging in the leisure of “finding myself.” But Gandolfini truly paid tribute to his dad with the film’s “You’re a man, now” moment that has critics praising the “affecting, subtle strokes” (The Hollywood Reporter) of his performance.

“I remember when I realized my dad was a man, like other men,” Gandolfini says . “He had dreams. He had a life that was completely separate from his family. As a son, if you see and feel that, your relationship with your father gets better. You realize that he’s not just stopping you from some dream of yours. He’s showing you that you have responsibilities…

“So this guy, like my dad, was saying, ‘Get as much of the other stuff in as you can, but life isn’t always going to be that way.’ That makes you appreciate that this guy gave up stuff for you… It’s a pretty big moment in a son’s life, I think.”

Gandolfini pauses thoughtfully, remembering James Joseph Gandolfini Sr., a brick mason from Borgotaro, Italy. “He talked about ‘The War’ late in life…There was so much I didn’t know. You can have a vision of your father, but it can never be complete. He’s not just the guy who drove me around when I was a kid, and yelled at me for not doing yardwork.

“That’s something I owed to my father, and it was my way of playing him.”

James Gandolfini Jr. is making his mark as a stellar character actor these days, taking on one last mob hit man in the critically acclaimed “Killing Them Softly” – “ You put all the mob guys I’ve played together, that’s who this guy is. At the end, the arc of his life is finished.”

And in the hunt-for-Bin-Laden thriller “Zero Dark Thirty,” Gandolfini is a testy, results-oriented CIA chief, probably Leon Panetta.

“It wasn’t a big part, but I wanted to be a part of an important movie. I liked the way it portrayed the military.”

But “Not Fade Away” (review is here) a Jersey tale with music, is closest to this Jersey guy’s heart. Well, except for the music part.

“I remember when I was a kid my friend Ira Berman playing Bruce Springsteen for me, and I said ‘that sucks. I can’t understand a word he’s saying!’

“Lo and behold, after listening to the album a few times, I got it. But boy, good thing I didn’t work for ‘Rolling Stone.’”

When his “Sopranos” boss David Chase asked James Gandolfini to play another New Jersey Italian for his movie, a working class dad unhappy with his musician-son’s career choice in the swinging ‘60s, the big man didn’t hesitate.

“I knew this guy,” Gandolfini says. “There’s a lot of my dad in him.”

Pasquale, his character in “Not Fade Away,” is a gruff mechanic who runs a local Pep Boys auto repair shop. He’s pushing his son (John Magaro) to go to college. He doesn’t approve of the kid’s music, his long hair, his crazy clothes.

“You look like you just got offa the boat,” Pasquale — he goes by the assimilated name “Pat” — bellows.

“I heard that from my parents,” Gandolfini says. The child of first-generation Italian immigrants who grew up in the ‘60s and 70s, “My mother used to say, in her thick Italian accent, ‘You look like Professor COR-ey!’ Remember (TV comic) Professor Irwin Corey? With the wild hair all over the place, and the long baggy coat? I got a LOT of that.”

That upbringing informs his father figure in “Not Fade Away,” in combative scenes that highlight the generation gap between Depression survivors and kids indulging in the leisure of “finding myself.” But Gandolfini truly paid tribute to his dad with the film’s “You’re a man, now” moment that has critics praising the “affecting, subtle strokes” (The Hollywood Reporter) of his performance.

“I remember when I realized my dad was a man, like other men,” Gandolfini says . “He had dreams. He had a life that was completely separate from his family. As a son, if you see and feel that, your relationship with your father gets better. You realize that he’s not just stopping you from some dream of yours. He’s showing you that you have responsibilities…

“So this guy, like my dad, was saying, ‘Get as much of the other stuff in as you can, but life isn’t always going to be that way.’ That makes you appreciate that this guy gave up stuff for you… It’s a pretty big moment in a son’s life, I think.”

Gandolfini pauses thoughtfully, remembering James Joseph Gandolfini Sr., a brick mason from Borgotaro, Italy. “He talked about ‘The War’ late in life…There was so much I didn’t know. You can have a vision of your father, but it can never be complete. He’s not just the guy who drove me around when I was a kid, and yelled at me for not doing yardwork.

“That’s something I owed to my father, and it was my way of playing him.”

James Gandolfini Jr. is making his mark as a stellar character actor these days, taking on one last mob hit man in the critically acclaimed “Killing Them Softly” – “ You put all the mob guys I’ve played together, that’s who this guy is. At the end, the arc of his life is finished.”

And in the hunt-for-Bin-Laden thriller “Zero Dark Thirty,” Gandolfini is a testy, results-oriented CIA chief, probably Leon Panetta.

“It wasn’t a big part, but I wanted to be a part of an important movie. I liked the way it portrayed the military.”

But “Not Fade Away” (review is here) a Jersey tale with music, is closest to this Jersey guy’s heart. Well, except for the music part.

“I remember when I was a kid my friend Ira Berman playing Bruce Springsteen for me, and I said ‘that sucks. I can’t understand a word he’s saying!’

“Lo and behold, after listening to the album a few times, I got it. But boy, good thing I didn’t work for ‘Rolling Stone.’”