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I've avoided making mention of this fact for as long as I could, but now personal vanity is forcing me to speak up.

This weekend, I will be taking part in The 3-Day Novel-Writing Contest, a reality TV show produced by the Canadian cable channel BookTelevision. The concept of the show is simple: 12 writers will be sequestered in a bookstore for three days and forced to write a novel while the cameras roll. Along the way, there are challenges, rewards and penalties. Nobody gets "voted of," happily; I suppose the producers figure that the pressure of simply completing an entire book in 72 hours is torture enough.

So here's where the vanity part kicks in: there's a poll on the BookTelevision website where audiences are asked to name the contestant they're rooting for. Apparently, the winner of the poll gets their choice of bed, as well as their choice of bunkmate. I didn't look at the poll until yesterday, and saw to my dismay that I was trailing... badly. (The leader, the last time I checked, was a guy named Gordon Kirkland, who is the author of something called Justice Is Blind... And Her Dog Just Peed in My Cornflakes.

I don't stand much of a chance of catching up to him at this point, but if you could take the time and vote for me, I'd really appreciate it. I won't win, but hopefully I'll at least finish a respectable distance from last place. Plus, you get to chuckle at more of my dopey-looking publicity photos! (And wonder how desperate a network has to be to let such a homely man appear on national television.)

Burnt Sienna

What’s with all the hate for Sienna Miller? Just look at these reader comments on The Onion’s “A.V. Club” review of her new film Interview, directed by and co-starring Steve Buscemi:

“Sienna Miller is one of the least talented actresses of the current generation.... She got fame for her looks (even though they aren't that special) and who she was dating, now she is trying to back up the earlier interest shown in her with acting and just isn't up to the job. I'm not saying that there aren't roles out there for her, just none that require a level of serious acting.”

“I thought she was good on Keen Eddie. The role required her to be vaguely pretty and annoying, which she pulled off well.”

“Why the fuck did [Steve Buscemi] cast this chick? The critics are eating it up, and now she's gonna be seen as a legitimate actress, just when it seemed like her career would be killed by the horrid Factory Girl. And Jude Law, please don't fuck anymore wannabe actresses. You're killing us here.”

I’m not sure whether these commenters realize that the hostility on display here—the unwillingness to even acknowledge the obvious fact that Sienna Miller is very beautiful—is precisely the same kind that Buscemi’s character in Interview has for Miller’s, and that it’s just as unattractive a trait onscreen.

Buscemi plays Pierre Peders, a reporter for Newsworld, who’s been assigned to write a puff piece on Katja, a tabloid-fodder starlet more famous for her boyfriends and her breasts than her acting talent. It’s never exactly clear why a Time/Newsweek-style newsmagazine would be interested in running a profile of a B-list star promoting a slasher movie called Killer Body 4, but at least Pierre recognizes it for the demeaning assignment that it is. As a “serious” journalist who’s filed reports from Sarajevo to Washington, he doesn’t even try to hide his contempt for Katja: he shows up for their interview completely unprepared, asks her a few insulting questions about her work, and refers to her under his breath as “Cuntya” after she walks out on him.

What follows are a series of not-entirely-convincing contrivances designed to get Pierre and Katja inside her awe-inspiringly gigantic Manhattan loft, where the interview continues deep into the night. Except it’s not so much a celebrity interview as a series of head games and power plays. And Katja proves to be more than a match for Pierre—even with all the wine and cocaine in her system, she’s able not just to parry his every insult (when he loftily tells her, “I don’t fuck celebrities,” she says, “Well, I don’t fuck nobodies”) but to seduce him into telling her all his secrets without really giving up any of her own. Put this woman on Charlie Rose, and he’d be on the floor whimpering within half an hour.

Which brings me back to Sienna Miller, who, fascinatingly, keeps getting cast as beautiful women who aren’t quite as shallow or stupid as they initially appear. I haven’t seen Factory Girl, her Edie Sedgwick biopic that opened last year to lukewarm reviews, but I really enjoyed her in Layer Cake, Alfie, and especially Stardust, in which she played the woman the hero thinks he’s in love at the start of the movie, but who we can see is much too conventional to ever make a dreamer like him happy. Except Miller is much more likable than Claire Danes, the hero’s “proper” love interest—I love the scene where she talks about the engagement ring the hero’s rival has given her and how he brought it “all the way from Ipswich!” Danes is literally playing a star that has fallen out of the sky, and yet Miller makes the trip to Ipswich seem like a much more magical journey.

Interview isn’t much of a movie—it feels more like an Off-Broadway acting exercise, a situation that gives the actors lots of “turns” and hidden “intentions” to play, none of which are particularly interesting to an audience. But Miller is as sharp as a tack in it—quick-witted, intuitive, unaffected, very aware of how to use her body. If you want to slam Scarlett Johansson, I’ll back you up every step of the way, but you’d better leave my gal Sienna alone.

R. Kelly: Closet Genius?

You know those stories about how in the 19th century, people used to gather on the docks of New York so they could be the first to read the latest chapters of the new Charles Dickens novel? That’s how I feel about R. Kelly’s Trapped in the Closet.

Don’t laugh: with the release this week of Chapters 13-22 on DVD, the plot of Kelly’s lurid musical soap opera has acquired the complexity of a Dickens novel—if you can imagine a Dickens novel full of gay church deacons, well-endowed midgets, stuttering pimps, lesbian waitresses, and characters who can’t stop pointing their guns at each other. And in which Dickens supplied all the characters’ voices.

In a surprise move, these 10 new chapters are debuting not on MTV or BET, but the Independent Film Channel, whose tastes run more toward Parker Posey movies than hip hop videos. But IFC’s Evan Shapiro stood by his decision to air them, proclaiming, “Trapped in the Closet challenges the traditional mores and sexual stereotypes of the current climate as boldly—and hysterically—as many films coming out of Hollywood or the indie movement.”

Well, maybe, but most of us just get a kick out of the midget with the big dick. Actually, fans of “Big Man” will be disappointed with this new batch of chapters; he makes only a brief cameo appearance at the end of Chapter 22 as part of a musical phone-call montage that’s the best of its kind since Bye Bye Birdie.

Instead, this time out, aided by an obviously bigger production budget, Kelly expands his story far beyond the cramped bedrooms and kitchens where Trapped in the Closet 1 played out and all over Chicago—various sequences are set in an Edward Hopper-esque diner, a church, even the home of Rosie, Sylvester’s nosy next-door neighbour.

In fact, there must be about three dozen characters enmeshed in this thing by now—and Kelly plays a huge percentage of them. Trapped in the Closet-ologists will recall the schizophrenic split that took place way back in Chapter 8, when, without warning, Kelly began playing not just Sylvester, the story’s beleaguered hero, but an omniscient narrator as well. Well, Kelly takes on three additional roles in Trapped 2, and I can’t decide which one is more ridiculous. He dons longjohns and a white cotton-ball beard to play Rosie’s husband Randolph; he’s the gold-toothed Pimp Luscious; and he’s also the preacher at Rufus’ church, who in one memorable scene tries to persuade Luscious to give up the pimping life while the choir chants, “You can do it, Pimp Luscious!”

This gospel interlude provides a rare interruption in Trapped’s repetitive yet oddly mesmerizing leaky-faucet score, over which Kelly speak-sings all the actors’ lines and narrates the action in comically exhaustive detail. That’s one of Kelly’s most endearing tics: the way he gives completely inconsequential details (a burst of static on the phone, a character straightening his cap) the same weight as someone pulling out a gun. Can Kelly even tell the difference?

More importantly, can he tell the difference between the people laughing with Trapped and the ones laughing at it? Kelly seems at least half-aware of this project’s camp value—especially whenever he’s in his Randolph costume. But on the making-of documentary included on the DVD, he also seems convinced that Trapped is a groundbreaking film that, decades from now, everybody’s grandkids will still be watching... and imitating.

From the sounds of it, Kelly will have to rely on his grandkids to finish this project. According to one report, he’s already written and recorded 51 more chapters (!) and now just needs the cash to film them. Where could this story spiral off to next? By Chapter 45, I picture it taking place in an intricately interconnected, self-contained, sexually obsessed universe where everybody—every man, woman and child—is played by R. Kelly. Nobody talks; they just have lip-synched conversations to which an invisible R. Kelly supplies the words. There is no war, just endless spats between husbands, wives and their respective lovers. It’s a vision of utopia that blows John Lennon’s “Imagine” right out of the water.

Why Can't These People Learn to Speak English?

A couple of weeks ago, Dennis Cozzalio, proprietor of the essential film blog Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule, invited me to participate in a poll Edward Copeland was conducting on his wonderful blog Edward Copeland on Film. (Are you still with me? Good.)

The end result of the poll will be to create a list of the Top 25 Non-English-Language Features of All Time, similar to those incessant AFI “Top 100” lists, but without a bloated three-hour TV special propping it up. As part of the 51-member nominating committee, I was asked to submit my own Top 25 list; Copeland would then compile a list of every film that had been named by at least three committee members and open up the resulting slate of nominees to votes by the public at large. (As it turned out, 121 titles made the cut; you can read the list here.

I have to admit, I was a little mortified when I saw who else was on the nominating committee; the thought that my opinions on world cinema were being given the same weight as people like Jonathan Rosenbaum and Annette Insdorf seemed absurd to me. But I don’t think I embarrassed myself—by which I guess I mean that my picks seem to be more or less congruent with the rest of the committee’s choices. Of my 25 titles, only seven weren’t cited by at least two other critics. (And I’ve belatedly realized that one of those titles, La Jetée, was disqualified from the poll, not being feature-length.)

If you’re curious, here’s my list, in alphabetical order (a star indicates a title that did not make it onto the master list of nominees):

8 1/2 (Federico Fellini)
Aguirre: The Wrath of God (Werner Herzog)
* The American Soldier (Rainer Werner Fassbinder)
L’Atalante (Jean Vigo)
The Battle of Algiers (Gillo Pontecorvo)
Belle de Jour (Luis Buñuel)
The Blue Angel (Josef von Sternberg)
* A Chinese Ghost Story (Siu-Tung Ching)
Cléo From 5 to 7 (Agnès Varda)
Contempt (Jean-Luc Godard)
Cries and Whispers (Ingmar Bergman)
L’Eclisse (Michelangelo Antonioni)
* Fires on the Plain (Kon Ichikawa)
In the Mood for Love (Wong Kar-Wai)
* La Jetée (Chris Marker)
* The Kingdom (Lars von Trier)
* Onibaba (Kaneto Shindo)
Playtime (Jacques Tati)
Raise the Red Lantern (Zhang Yimou)
The Rules of the Game (Jean Renoir)
Sátántangó (Béla Tarr)
Seven Samurai (Akira Kurosawa)
Shoot the Piano Player (François Truffaut)
Wings of Desire (Wim Wenders)
* The Young Girls of Rochefort (Jacques Demy)

A couple of notes: films made before 2002 were ineligible. Also, I restricted myself to no more than one film from any particular director—hence, The American Soldier instead of Ali: Fear Eats the Soul; Contempt instead of Weekend or A Woman Is a Woman; Shoot the Piano Player instead of Jules and Jim; Cries and Whispers instead of Persona. Paul Schrader will be furious with me: Bresson, Dreyer and Ozu are all absent from my list.

Of my starred films, I’m most surprised that Fires on the Plain had so few fans; this 1959 film’s nightmarish vision of war has haunted me ever since I saw it as a teenager. I’m not surprised, however, by the absence of a couple of my kookier choices. The American Soldier, for instance, is one of Fassbinder’s earlier efforts, and I’ve always had a soft spot for its goofy take on film noir—especially the hilariously sustained slow-motion climax—much more so than some of Fassbinder’s grimmer efforts. (That’s true of Godard for me too—I’d much rather rewatch A Woman Is a Woman much more than, say, Vivre sa Vie or La Chinoise. But that's true for most people, isn't it?) And while I don’t know if I could defend A Chinese Ghost Story as a towering work of cinematic art—I feel a little self-conscious about including it over a classic like Tokyo Story—it was one of the first Hong Kong pictures I ever saw, and catching it on the big screen with an enthusiastic audience at the Princess Theatre in Edmonton remains one of my all-time favourite moviegoing experiences.

You can find a selection of other critics’ lists at Jim Emerson's
Scanners blog—it’s fascinating to see where people’s tastes diverge and where they unexpectedly line up.

I’m also curious to see which film will come out on top in Edward’s poll. I’m not sure there’s a foreign equivalent to Citizen Kane or The Godfather—a title that you know is guaranteed to come out on top on pretty much any poll you conduct. Titles like Tokyo Story, Seven Samurai, Rules of the Game and 8 1/2 are likely to perform well, but can those older titles still count on the kind of widespread popular support enjoyed by more recent nominees like Amélie, City of God, Run Lola Run and Cinema Paradiso?

You’ve got until September 16 to make your voice heard, either dubbed or subtitled, so go to Edward’s site and send him your ballot.

Twilight of the Pods

The 1956 film Invasion of the Body Snatchers concludes with Kevin McCarthy standing in the middle of a highway, frantically trying to flag down the passing cars to warn them about the infestation of alien “pod people” that has taken over his hometown. “You’re next!” he cries, his eyes ultimately locking with the camera, as if to warn us that even those of us sitting in the movie theatre aren’t safe. “You’re next!” It’s one of the most memorable, despairing final scenes in any science fiction film.

If anything, though, the conclusion of Philip Kaufman’s 1978 remake is even more disturbing: Donald Sutherland pointing his finger and screaming at Veronica Cartwright, signaling his fellow pod people that a human being is in their midst. Both movies are depressing, sure, even nihilistic, but that’s the whole point of Invasion of the Body Snatchers: the message of these movies is “They’ll get you eventually.” You can try running, you can take as many pills as you like, but the pod people are unstoppable. You’ve got to sleep sometime.

But that’s not the message The Invasion wants to leave you with. This is the fourth screen version of Jack Finney’s novel The Body Snatchers (Abel Ferrara directed a workmanlike variation on the story in 1993 set on an army base), and while director Oliver Hirschbiegel doesn’t depart from its predecessors in the broad outlines of the plot—a small group of ordinary people try to stay alive as everyone around them gets gradually replaced by emotionless alien clones of themselves—it makes one key change that violates Finney’s entire concept.

In this version, when Nicole Kidman and Daniel Craig try to stay awake and out of the clutches of the pod people, it’s not just some futile, ultimately doomed effort to hold onto their humanity for as long as possible. No, in this version, Kidman is trying to stay alive long enough to get her son (who has some kind of pod immunity) to an army base where government scientists can use his cells to create a pod-person vaccine. You thought the happy ending that the studio tacked on to some prints of the 1956 Body Snatchers was ridiculous? Just wait till you get to the end of The Invasion, in which we learn that not only does humankind defeat the pod people, but that the government was able to inoculate everyone in the world who had become a pod person and turn them back! Come on, Oliver Hirschbiegel (if that is in fact your real name)—you can’t cure a pod person! Not since The Natural decided to show Roy Hobbs smashing a climactic home run instead of taking a bribe to throw the game have I seen a more spectacular failure of nerve on the part of a movie adaptation.

Taken on its own terms, The Invasion creates a couple of eerie moments—there’s an effectively creepy scene, for instance, where Kidman gets a late-night visit from a sinister census-taker. (And the TV newscasts that you glimpse in the background, showing the end of conflict in the Middle East, American soldiers returning home from Iraq, and even George W. Bush shaking hands with Hugo Chavez, provide some wry comic relief.) But the central horror of this story—an entire city slowly, invisibly losing its humanity—never takes hold. With its muted tone, its antiseptic blue/grey cinematography, Kidman’s immaculate outfits, it’s like a zombie movie for neat freaks.

Reportedly, The Invasion underwent substantial reshoots when the producers decided it needed more action—some say as much of a third of the film was directed by V for Vendetta’s James McTeigue. What is it about Nicole Kidman’s presence that seems to attract so many trouble productions? The Stepford Wives, Bewitched, Eyes Wide Shut, The Invasion... all of them involved substantial re-edits and reshoots, sometimes with different casts. But none of that turmoil shows up on her smooth, unlined face, which nowadays seems even more placid and remote than ever. What happened to the vibrant comedienne of Moulin Rouge and To Die For? Is she even human anymore? Or did Nicole Kidman just fall asleep one night and awaken the next morning as yet another Hollywood pod person?

Thumb Kind of Wonderful

Maybe it’s not quite as momentous as the BBC’s plans to upload their entire archive onto the Internet, but the announcement earlier this month that Buena Vista Entertainment was putting 5,000 video movie reviews from Siskel & Ebert and Ebert & Roeper online was exciting news indeed, especially for Generation X movie buffs who had grown up with the program—and in many cases had gotten their first taste of sophisticated movie criticism by watching Siskel and Ebert duke it out from their uncomfortable-looking balcony seats.

The ambitious “Balcony Archive” can be found here. The collection only goes back as far as about 1985; as Ebert explains in his introductory essay on the site, in those pre-home video days, no one imagined those shows would be worth preserving (after all, why would anyone want to watch reviews of movies that weren’t even in theatres anymore?) and the tapes were erased or thrown out in order to make room. Luckily, the shows that survived ably capture Siskel and Ebert in all their testy glory, their genuine, visceral dislike of each other still vividly apparent even 20 years later.

There’s more than 400 hours worth of material in the archive (if you include the Richard Roeper era, aka “The Lost Years”), an intimidating total for a casual browser. So let me help you get started. Here’s my highlight reel of the best clips from Siskel & Ebert history—it’s a treasure trove of sweater-clad cinephilia at its most argumentative!

Cop and a Half (1993)
Ebert’s inexplicable endorsement of this dismal kiddie comedy starring Burt Reynolds as a grouchy cop forced to partner up with a precocious eight-year-old obviously caught Siskel off-guard. “Wowee,” chuckles a dumbfounded Siskel, “where’s your big red suit and beard, Santa? You just gave them a gift!” It was perhaps the only time Siskel made a joke about Ebert’s weight that was actually funny.

Benji the Hunted/Full Metal Jacket (1987)
It’s too bad that The Balcony Archive doesn’t contain complete shows and instead splits the footage up into reviews of individual movies, because this episode from 1987 really needs to be seen in its entirety in order to appreciate Siskel’s mounting incredulity that Ebert could give thumbs-up to a wildlife picture about a dog taking care of some orphaned cougar cubs (“I was bored, Roger! Bored with Benji running!”) and thumbs-down to a anti-war Vietnam epic by Stanley Kubrick. (“This whole sequence is taken out of absolutely routine grade-B Republic Studios WWII movies!”)

Blue Velvet (1986)
It’s easy to forget what a shocking, almost incomprehensible experience David Lynch’s thriller was when it first came out, but this clip (which can also be found on the recent Blue Velvet DVD) brings it all flooding back. So powerful was the film’s effect on Ebert that he seems weirdly unable to distinguish Isabella Rossellini the actress from the victimized character she’s playing—and it’s hard to decide whether his protective attitude toward her is feminist or outrageously condescending. The goofy dialogue at the end of the clip (“If he’s going to play me like a piano, he’d better get some music that’s worth listening to.” “I think this is a good song!”) is worthy of Lynch himself.

Home Alone 3 (1997)
Siskel: “If this movie had a theme song, it would be ‘Dumbbells Keep Falling on My Head.’ The story makes no sense. I feel for every family that’s going to be suckered into seeing Home Alone 3.” Ebert: “This is going to astound you, but I’m giving the movie thumbs-up.” Siskel: “It does astound me. Are you okay?” Ebert: “Better than you were the day you liked Starship Troopers.” Me: Chortle!

One False Move (1992)
Siskel and Ebert made a point of repeatedly championing this low-budget crime thriller—an early acting/screenwriting effort from Billy Bob Thornton—and pretty much single-handedly (double-handedly?) rescued it from straight-to-video obscurity and earned it a national theatrical release. Gene and Roger were famous for their arguments, but when they found a worthwhile movie, they were always able to put their differences aside for the greater good. This clip shows them at their best.

Twinkle, Twinkle

It’s hard not to feel kindly disposed toward a movie like Stardust. Matthew Vaughn’s adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s novel has an old-fashioned sense of storybook romance, and an ability to tweak fantasy conventions without resorting to the empty, TV-influenced pop-culture anachronisms of the Shrek movies. I haven’t read the novel, but I assume most of the lovelier notions in Stardust are Gaiman’s inventions: for instance, the sly joke of a prince literally bleeding blue blood when his throat is cut; or the way Yvaine (Claire Danes), a star that has fallen out of the sky and taken on human form, literally glows whenever she’s happy.

If I could glow like Yvaine as I watched Stardust, though, I’d probably have been lit up only half the time. Or more accurately, my lights would be turning unpredictably off and on all the way through the movie, annoying everybody else in the theatre. Stardust is one of those movies that seems perpetually on the verge of being wonderful, but never quite manages to propel itself over the top. Like Yvaine, it wants to ascend to the heavens, but it spends most of its time frustratingly earthbound.

Part of the problem, I think, is that while it contains a lot of imaginative touches, the Stardust universe (sorry, Gaiman fans) is not very deeply imagined. The people we meet seem more like notions for characters than flesh-and-blood people with a long history behind them—we don’t get much of a sense, for instance, of what being a star means to Yvaine or what she used to do all day up there in the sky or whether falling to earth is a tragedy for her or just an annoyance. What does it mean to be a star? How are stars different from people? That sounds like a silly question, but it’s an important one in a fantasy movie—and it’s one that I bet a filmmaker like, say, Joss Whedon would never have left unanswered.

Critics tend to denigrate special-effects movies, but the ability to seamlessly integrate visual effects into the emotional fabric of a film is an underrated talent that very few directors have mastered: Steven Spielberg, Peter Jackson, James Cameron, maybe J.J. Abrams. Vaughn, whose only other feature film was the British gangster flick Layer Cake, is still learning. There’s something just a little bit off about many of the scenes in Stardust—no one onscreen seems to react to the magical events around them in quite the right way. There’s no fear or awe or delight on the people’s faces—every effect is greeted by a shrug.

I found myself inexplicably peeved, for instance, by the scene in which Yvaine and the young hero, Tristran (appealing newcomer Charlie Cox), find themselves magically transported on top of a cloud. They just stand there as if they’re on solid ground—shouldn’t they be, I don't know, more floaty or something? And shouldn’t Tristran be freaked out by how high up he is and worried whether the cloud will support him? I know, I know: it’s a minor quibble, but these little touches are what give a fantasy movie its texture, its weight, its... well, its reality. (SPOILER ALERT: I also truly detested the way he kills off Ricky Gervais’ character—there’s a callousness to that scene that really made me wonder whether Vaughn had any business directing a fantasy.)

I know it sure doesn’t sound like it, but on the whole I actually enjoyed this movie. If I’ve focused on Stardust’s failings, it’s more out of frustration at seeing so many missed opportunities sail by than any genuine animus toward the film as a whole. One of the film’s nicest inventions is a long wall that separates mundane England from the mythical land of “Stormhold,” where magic reigns supreme—there’s a gap in the wall where people can cross over, provided they can get past the ancient guard assigned to keep that from happening. I’d say Stardust gets maybe halfway through to Stormhold before the guard grabs Vaughn by the belt and pulls him back in.

Okay, Piggy... You Axed for It

Okay... after watching this clip from the British sketch comedy show Saturday Zoo, I'm prepared to take back every negative thing I said two posts down about Christopher Walken's supposedly embarrassing comedy career. What can I say? The man is a master! Now if I could only find a clip of Udo Kier guest-hosting on Blue's Clues...

(Link courtesy of Screengrab)

I Read It for the Articles

I love reading long, discursive interviews with movie directors, and so I didn’t hesitate to plunk down $30 (Canadian) at my local bookstore for a copy of The Playboy Interviews: The Directors, a compilation of 18 interviews with 16 notable filmmakers that the venerable men’s magazine conducted between 1963 and 2004. (Clint Eastwood and Oliver Stone each get interviewed twice.)

As I read through the book, I was reminded of how, earlier this year, I also worked my way through that DVD box set of episodes from The Dick Cavett Show featuring chats with “Hollywood Legends” (John Huston, Orson Welles, Alfred Hitchcock, Katharine Hepburn and more). Both collections seemed like relics from a bygone age of celebrity interviewing. Any show of seriousness is anathema to talk shows and magazine profiles nowadays, but it’s nice to be reminded of a time when actors and directors were routinely asked about their views on love, politics, money, and art instead of merely plugging their latest projects. The Playboy interview with Stanley Kubrick, for instance, doesn’t even discuss movies at all—instead, Kubrick and interviewer Eric Norden spend 30 pages talking about the possibility of alien life forms and all the ways in which the new science of cryogenics is going to benefit humankind. It’s actually a little bit stultifying, and Kubrick comes off as a bit of a pompous bore, but it’s kind of amazing to think that a major mainstream magazine would actually devote that much space to such a heady conversation.

It’s also interesting to see these directors talk about “upcoming projects” that in fact never got made. In the interview with the Coen Brothers (which took place while they were filming The Man Who Wasn’t There), it sounds like it's a done deal that their next project will be To the White Sea, a nearly dialogue-free adaptation of James Dickey’s WWII novel about an American pilot who gets shot down over Japan, starring Brad Pitt.

The Robert Altman interview, conducted in 1976, mentions no fewer than five upcoming projects, none of which ever got made, at least by Altman: a film version of E.L. Doctorow’s Ragtime (later made by Milos Forman), a film version of another Doctorow novel, The Book of Daniel (later made by Sidney Lumet), an adaptation of Kurt Vonnegut’s Breakfast of Champions starring Peter Falk, Cleavon Little and Alice Cooper, with Sterling Hayden as Kilgore Trout and Ruth Gordon in a transsexual role as Eliot Rosewater (later made, with a different cast, by Alan Rudolph), “a cross between M*A*S*H and Dr. Strangelove” about the military industrial complex called Yig Epoxy, and a movie about Hollywood bit players called The Extra, which Altman was developing for Lily Tomlin. (It’s a little shocking to hear Altman glibly refer to one of the characters in Breakfast of Champions as “the fag piano player”—but it confirms my suspicion that one of the things that went wrong on Ready to Wear is that Altman has no feeling for homosexual characters and tends to see them as grotesques.)

For some reason, the book doesn’t come out in the U.S. until October (at least, that’s what Amazon says), so I thought I’d give you Americans an appetite-whetting selection of some of the choice quotes from each of the interviews. I guess these could be considered spoilers, but since the book is so thick, you can rest assured that there’s plenty more where these came from.

ROBERT ALTMAN (August 1976)
Q: Is it true that you threw Barbra Streisand out of your office?
Altman: Yes, because she was rude. She came as a guest of mine with her boyfriend, Jon Peters—to see Nashville, at her request—because Peters as planning to direct a rock Star Is Born or something. So we screened the picture for them and for 20 or 30 other people, including some of the actors in the film. Then we came back here to the office; Barbra sat down and all her conversation was about “Jon and I.” “Listen,” she said, “Jon and I want to know how you did this, how you did that.” Finally, I said, “Don’t you think you owe a comment to a few of the people in this room?” She had nothing to say. She was so completely wrapped up in herself, she didn’t even know what I was talking about. I just asked them to leave.

INGMAR BERGMAN (June 1964)
(opening question)
Bergman: Well, are you depressed yet?

JOEL & ETHAN COEN (November 2001)
Joel Coen: I hate when people cry in movies. It’s particularly disconcerting when you’re sitting at a really awful movie and you hear people all around you sobbing and blowing their noses.
Q: Do you ever cry?
Joel Coen: I cried during Dancer in the Dark. [Laughing.] Actually, I barely sat through it. I hate to say this, but the best part of the movie was when Björk beat David Morse to death with a metal box.

FRANCIS FORD COPPOLA (July 1975)
My father, who is an enormously talented man, was the focus of all our lives, the three children and my mother. Our lives centered on what we all felt was the tragedy of his career. He was a very frustrated man, because, though he played first flute for the NBC Symphony under Toscanini, he felt that his own music never really emerged. I worked for Western Union one summer when I was 14 and, for some unknown reason—I still don’t know why—I wrote up a phony telegram to my father telling him he’d landed a job writing the musical score for such and such a film. I signed it with the name of the guy who was in charge of music at Paramount Pictures. My father was overjoyed and yelled, “It’s my break! It’s my break!” And I had to tell him it wasn’t true. He was heartbroken. Is that a terrible story?

CLINT EASTWOOD (March 1997)
Q: Any parts you wish you [hadn’t turned down]?
Eastwood: There are some you turn down because you don’t feel instinctively right about the material, or maybe you think you aren’t the right guy. One interested me a while back. The Killing Fields. You remember the one, where the guy is a New York journalist who goes into Cambodia. I liked the script a lot and thought it would make a good movie. But I thought, If you cast Clint Eastwood in a film called The Killing Fields, you know damn well that that’s going to send a message every reel. And they’re going to be terribly disappointed. You’re going to get that crowd and that crowd only.

FEDERICO FELLINI (February 1966)
Q: Among your friends, you have a reputation as a teller of tall tales. One of them, in fact, has gone so far as to call you “a colossal, compulsive, consummate liar.” What’s your reaction?
Fellini: At least he gives me credit for being consummate.

JOHN HUSTON (September 1985)
Q: Did you ever consider working with Ernest Hemingway in any way?
Huston: I was going to do a picture of Hemingway’s at one time and the idea was for him to do a voice-over, a foreword to it, but it was impossible. His voice had a funny lack of expression in it.
Q: Does anyone today remind you of Hemingway?
Huston: I’ll tell you the actor who looks more like him than anybody else but doesn’t resemble him in any other way: Burt Reynolds. He could be his brother.

STANLEY KUBRICK (September 1968)
One eminent astronomer... has propounded the theory that both moons of Mars are artificial space satellites launched by the Martians thousands of years ago in an effort to escape the dying surface of their planet. He bases this theory on the unique orbits of the two moons, which, unlike the 31 other satellites in our solar system, orbit faster than the revolution of their host planet. The orbit of Phobos is also deteriorating in an inexplicable manner and dragging the satellite progressively closer to Mars’ surface. Both of these circumstances, Shklovsky contends, make sense only if the two moons are hollow.

SPIKE LEE (July 1991)
Q: Do you remember the first film you saw that made you want to make movies?
Lee: Wait a minute. I never had a moment like that. It was never, “I saw Lawrence of Arabia when I was two and suddenly I was hit by the magic power of film.” That’s bullshit. Like I told you, I just went to the movies. Nobody thought about being a director, not me or anybody else. I read that all the time: “After I saw that picture, I knew there was nothing else for me to do.” That’s a lie. It’s just bullshit when people say that.
Q: Maybe it’s a lie sometimes, but certainly, some directors see movies as kids and want to make films.
Lee: I think it’s bullshit. It’s just something almost every director says. I have never believed it. I tell you this: it wasn’t that way for me. “That’s what makes movies seem like this magical thing” or somethin’. That’s just Hollywood bullshit, people saying that shit because it makes makin’ movies special, and the people who make movies special. The first time I went on a movie set, it didn’t look like nothin’ magical to me.

DAVID MAMET (April 1995)
Let me tell you my favorite story about [fame]. Gregory Mosher is flying from Chicago to New York because he’s casting a play and he wants to see Rex Harrison. The plane is late and he gets in the cab and says, “47th and Broadway, I’m going to the theater.”
So the cabdriver says, “What are you going to see?”
And Mosher tells him.
“Who’s in it?” the cabdriver asks.
“Rex Harrison and Claudette Colbert.” The driver stands on the brakes, pulls over to the side, turns around in the seat and says, “Claudette Colbert? Claudette Colbert? I fucked her maid.”
That is absolutely my favorite theatrical story.

ROMAN POLANSKI (December 1971)
Q: What have you got against smokers?
Polanski: They don’t bother me if they want to ruin their own health. It’s their problem, and I’m not one to force the issue, but what bothers me is that they stick their cigarette butts everywhere. You find them in the washbasin, in the toilet, all over the house, in the backyard, burns in the curtains, the smell of smoke in your own hair. They take some perverted pleasure in uglifying their own closest surroundings by sticking these butts even into their food—into eggshells, in the cucumbers, in the mashed potatoes, in the half-empty bottle of beer, everywhere. Sometimes I’m afraid to screw.

MARTIN SCORSESE (April 1991)
Q: Any other wisdom to share?
Scorsese: I’m reminded of a sequence I always loved from Diary of a Country Priest. The priest is listening to a woman’s problems. She’s had a very hard time. He tells her something I’ve always felt deep down: “God is not a torturer. He just wants us to be merciful with ourselves.”
Q: Is that the kind of advice you’d give to Martin Scorsese?
Scorsese: It’s good advice!

OLIVER STONE (February 1988)
Q: Weren’t there some explicit sex scenes that you cut from Salvador?
Stone: Sure. We had this party scene where James Belushi gets a blow job under a table and Jimmy Woods is trying to get information from the colonel while he’s screwing this hooker and the colonel is drunk and throwing ears—human ears—into a champagne glass. His line was, “Left-wing ears, right-wing ears; who gives a fuck? Here’s to Salvador!” And he makes a toast. Belushi throws up. We showed a version of the film with that scene in it to preview audiences here in the U.S., and the comment cards that came back didn’t like it.

QUENTIN TARANTINO (November 2003)
I’m a method writer. I become one or two characters when I’m writing. When I was doing Kill Bill, I was the Bride. People noticed that when I was writing, I was getting much more feminine in my outlook. All of a sudden, I was buying things for my apartment or house. I’d see something cool in a shop in Greenwich Village, and I’d buy it. An item could jump off a shelf at me, through a window. I’d have to buy it, take it home and try it out. I’d buy flowers for the house and start arranging them. I don’t normally wear jewelry, and suddenly I’m wearing jewelry. My friends said, “You’re getting in touch with your feminine side. You’re nesting, adorning yourself.”

ORSON WELLES (March 1967)
Q: How do you feel about the films of Antonioni?
Welles: According to a young American critic, one of the great discoveries of our age is the value of boredom as an artistic subject. If that is so, Antonioni deserves to be counted as a pioneer and founding father. His movies are perfect backgrounds for fashion models. Maybe there aren’t backgrounds that good in Vogue, but there ought to be. They ought to get Antonioni to design them.

BILLY WILDER (June 1963)
The worst thing that can happen to us in this business is if a dog picture makes a hit, then we all have to make dog pictures because the people with the money trust dogs. But if one like [La Dolce Vita] makes a hit, it is the greatest thing—as long as it is not loaded with the stars who are always advertising themselves in the trades. It’s a question of money, and yet it is not a question of money anymore in Hollywood. The beauty of our capitalist system is that you can’t keep what you make even if you make a lousy picture that’s a hit; so why not try to make something good? Today’s capitalist system is for those who already have the money, not for those who are making it. There is really very little use in my working, since I can’t keep the money. I can never get richer than I am. So why am I beating my brains out? I go to the studio because I can’t stand listening to my wife’s vacuum cleaner at home, and also because I can’t find three bridge partners or somebody to go to the ball game with. Also I work to waylay some of the phonies from getting Academy Awards.

Jason Takes Manhattan (and Moscow, and Tangier, and London...)

The Bourne Ultimatum opens in Moscow, with a limping Jason Bourne (Matt Damon) pursued through the nighttime streets by a few carfuls of Russian cops, who refer to him simply as “the suspect from the tunnel chase.” In other words, this story has so much action that there’s a gigantic chase scene that the movie doesn’t even have room for.

Jason Bourne begins the movie alone, bleeding and on the run, and he ends the movie in much the same way. In between, he travels to Madrid, Tangier, London and New York; he plays complicated cat-and-mouse games with a ruthless CIA chief played by David Strathairn; he flirts over the phone with Joan Allen; he flirts face-to-face with Julia Stiles; he tries to guide a nosy Guardian reporter through the crowds at London’s Waterloo Station without being seen by the dozens of security cameras; he steals a police car; he steals a motorcycle; he leaps from rooftops across narrow alleys and straight through open windows; he drives a car off a roof; he snatches a guy’s gun right out of his hand; he roughs up Albert Finney; he breaks into a secret CIA branch office in downtown Manhattan; he outwits a crack team of government assassins using nothing more than a lightbulb and an electric fan; he learns his real name; and he beats a guy half to death with a book.

In short, he spends the full two hours of The Bourne Ultimatum being basically the most awesome action hero of the decade. Yet he’s also a tragic figure: haunted not just by the death of his lover Marie (the peerless Franka Potente) but by the nameless faces of all the men he’s killed, for reasons he’s still struggling to understand. And I don’t want to give anything away, but there’s a revelation near the end of this film about Bourne’s past and his relationship to the shadowy Treadstone program that makes him even more tragic and raises all sorts of troubling new questions about his true nature and his true identity.

There’s something satisfying adult about the Bourne series: as exhilarating as the action sequences frequently are, there’s a grimness underneath it all, a sense that no matter how efficiently Bourne exacts his revenge on the government that stole his life from him, happiness will always elude him, that revenge will never be satisfying, that he can never become human again, that he will always be running, running, running, a slave to instincts he can never control, with no end in sight.

What a depressing thought. Let’s talk about those action sequences instead! Director Paul Greengrass eases up a little—not much, but a little—on the rapid-fire editing style and the jittery handheld camerawork that made some of the big action setpieces in The Bourne Supremacy (or as I like to call it, The Bourne Penultimatum) so hard to follow. Things still move fast in this installment, and Greengrass’ staging has the same sense of anxious confusion as the previous installments, but this time out, you feel better oriented within the confusion, if that makes sense—he always gives you just enough shorthand visual information to make you understand what Bourne is doing without sacrificing the chaotic immediacy of each scene. No sooner does he give you a brief glimpse of a stone lying diagonally against a curb, for instance, than Bourne uses it as a ramp for a daredevil mid-chase motorcycle jump.

Is there any action director out there right now better than Greengrass at choreographing extras? Every scene in The Bourne Ultimatum, every corner of the frame, bustles with life—even that unbelievably intricate sequence in Waterloo Station feels like it was captured on the fly, as if Greengrass and his crew just showed up there unannounced one weekend and shot it all, guerrilla-style.

The film has such an assured, documentary-style texture (and Damon brings such effortless gravitas to the Bourne character) that you barely register that every aspect of the plot, from its amnesiac superpowered hero to the miraculously preserved clue Bourne retrieves from a car explosion, is utterly ludicrous. The Bourne Ultimatum is a hot mug of moviegoing adrenaline (yeah, that’s right: moviegoing adrenaline. It tastes a little like cinnamon); I wanted to run out of the theatre, then run back in and see it again. But I didn’t. I’m not Jason Bourne, and I was too afraid the ushers would catch me.