One Minute Review - Eat Pray Love (2 out of 5)

Eat Pray Love is about as simple and unassuming as it's title suggest. Of course it is. It's another example of putting stars into big movies and sending them out into the world to find no real dranger or drama. It happened with Brad Pitt in Seven Years in Tibet, Patrick Swayze in City of Joy and now it happens to Julia Roberts here. So what we are left with is a half hearted story in which a white woman travels to three places around the world to do exactly what's in the title after having a mid-life crisis of sorts. Conviently for her she always manages to bump into another American along the way or, when she runs across a foerigner, luckily enough, it is Javier Bardem.

Eat Pray Love was adapted from a best seller by Elizabeth Gilbert who is either the most boring of travelers or the victim of a poor, predictable adaptation. If, along the way, Gilbert achieved something profound in her personal journey, the remnants of it are not to be found here.

Maybe it's the fault of writer/director Ryan Murphy (of Glee fame) who overshoots and understuffs. Murphy has a way of confusing movement with artistry and bigness for something profound. Along with his cinamatographer, Murphy has the camera swoop and swirl and push in and push out and spin around from above, trying to make a lack of material seem big enough to inhabit its own running time. Take a scene in which Roberts, having come from a meeting with her laywer and husband over their divorce, comes upon her husband in the elevator. Instead of allowing a quite moment to pass between them Muphy lets the camera rapidly push in on her and the cuts immediatly to it doing the same thing on him. A small moment is forced to become a big moment and the impact is lost by being underlined. Stretch that to 2 and a half hours and you have about the effect of Eat Pray Love.  

Desert Island CD

Because last year's Desert Island DVD list was such a big smash Castor from Anomalous Material has devised a new list in which we pick 12 songs that we would take with us on a desert island and they all need to be from movie soundtracks. So, in no particular order:

1. Nine Inc Nails - Dead Souls (The Crow)



I think the Crow is a great movie from Alex Proyas and Nine Inch Nails are one of my favourite bands. The band's cover of the Joy Division song is what every cover should be: a faithful interpretation of the original while an update by the new band. Long before The Social Network Trent Reznor was already becoming a VIP soundtrack artist.

2. Elvis Costello - She (Notting Hill)



Costello is one of my favourite vocalists and although I love everything from his snotty early punk days to his transformation into country and pop and everything else under the musical rainbow I don't think he's ever let his silky smooth vocals soar over a song quite like they do on this one.

3. Trisha Yearwood - HowDo I Live(Con Air)



Funny, Con Air was on my Desert Island DVD list as well and maybe this song has something to do with that. Usually not a fan of pop country, there's something about this song that sets the tone for the whole movie, making it more human and grounded than usual big budget action vehicles. When Nic Cage meets his daughter for the first time at the end and hands her the dirty pink bunny while this song plays my heart skips a beat every time.

4. R. Kelly - I Believe I Can Fly (Space Jam)



There was a time, circa grade 6 or 7 where, when I wasn't playing basketball with friends I was wathing Space Jam and when I wasn't watching Space Jam I was listening to the Space Jam soundtrack and it was this song that always struck me the most. I love how it builds to the huge emotional payoff at the end.

5. Another Day (Rent)



I love musicals and Rent is my favourite and this song just embodies everything I love about it.

6. Michael Bolton - Go The Distance (Hercules)



There are two Disney songs I love and this is one of them. Just such a lovely song.

7. Part of Your Wold (The Little Mermaid)



Here's the other one

8. Come What May (Moulin Rouge)



Just another one of those wonderful songs that makes a good musical into a great one.

9. Whitney Houston - I Will Always Love You (The Bodyguard)



The ultimate diva sings the ultimate ballad

10. Bruce Springsteen - Streets of Philidelphia (Philidelphia)



Few movies have as great an opening credit montage as Philidelpia and that is in part due to Springsteen's heart wrenching ballad. His song from The Wrestler could just as easily have been included but I went for the more ionic one. I just wouldn't want to live the rest of my life without The Boss

11. Josh Groban - Belive (The Polar Express)



Another soaring ballad but another one of my favourite songs from one of my favourite movies. Would come in handy come Christmas time as well.

12. Train - Ordinary (Spider-Man 2)



I guess I need one rock song to offset all the schmaltz

The Adjustment Bureau ( 4 out of 5)

Rumor has it that when the original Young Turks of the Cashiers du Cinema gathered years after the fact for a round table discussion one of the topics was with regards to how they had argued so hard towards the director as the artist of his own work that when he was finally given artistic freedom, he didn’t know what to do with it.

That is, in one way or another, the logic behind the Adjustment Bureau as explained by Terrence Stamp’s Thompson in one of those film stealing monologue scenes. It’s that free will is just an illusion. Sure we can chose what tie to wear and what tooth paste to use, but give a person real power over themselves and we get the Dark Ages or World Wars. Thus there is a Chairman who has a plan devised for everyone and when we step off course, he sends his men to give us all a nudge back into fulfilling the destiny that was set out for us.


That’s the story told anyway in the new film of the same name which places Matt Damon and Emily Blunt into, what is essentially an old fashioned melodrama with the ideas surrounding them loosely based on a Phillip K. Dick short story that, just possibly, Alex Proyas also had in mind when he dreamed up his masterpiece Dark City. It’s the foregrounding of this romance that essentially holds the movie together, giving it human momentum within a story that hasn’t been given half as much though by its writer/director George Nolfi as say was given to the aforementioned Dark City or even Inception for that matter, but then again, the old adage still stands: love conquers all.

Damon plays David Norris, a former bad boy turned senate hopeful in New York who looks poised to win until a picture of some former college hijinks is put into print and Norris loses. In the bathroom, before his speech on election night he meets Elise (Blunt) and immediately establishes a connection until she is chased away, no name or number having been given, by a pair of guards looking for her for crashing a wedding upstairs.

Norris, smitten and frustrated, manages a speech that night that is honest and compelling and looks like it will set him on course for a win come next term. Meanwhile, on a bus to his new job, he meets up with Elise and they manage to exchange numbers. However, this wasn’t the plan for Norris who, upon arrival to the office, finds men in suits erasing memories from his co-workers. They give chase but are inescapable. Their hats, we are later told, allow them the power to go through doors and be teleported around the city like magic. It’s a neat trick that doesn’t get much more logical an explanation than this.

Norris is told of this mysterious Chairman and this divine plan that has been written for everyone and is mapped out in convenient animated books which, despite their power, look less impressive and versatile than Ipads. Apparently God hasn’t caught up with the times. But now, reeling myself back in, I’ve gone and made an important assumption that the film wisely doesn’t. These men don’t stand in for angels nor the Chairman for God, although the parallels are there: we know this Chairman, we are told, by many different names and have met him but never know as he appears in a different form to everyone.

The thing is, Norris was never meant to meet Elise and her presence, if a relationship is allowed to develop, will throw both of their destinies off course and will ultimately, if Thompson is to be believed, ruin both of them. Therefore, the agents follow Norris, “nudging” him every once in a while in order to keep him on the fast track to greatness and away from Elise. The logic here though is a bit murky: if the agents need to keep nudging Norris back on track, aren’t they changing also, by doing so, the destinies of those around them, in a Butterfly Effect-like manner, or are there other agents who need to come in and nudge everyone else back on course after an initial nudge? That must require a lot of man power. Maybe in the sequel we can go backstage at the Bureau and see the Chairman going through the recruitment process.

The film is wise in that it doesn’t explicitly draw a religious parallel, which would ultimately ground it in some sort of reality and make it into something it isn’t, although it does suggest a certain spiritual subtext by which Nolfi, on several occasions, films Damon in long shot amidst beautiful, sprawling backgrounds which were, depending on how you look at it, either the design of human artistry or part of an overall destiny in which one small man is passing through.

And then the story ultimately becomes a romantic thriller in which Norris, with the help of one optimistic agent played by Anthony Mackie, tries to avert the agents, who aren’t, in one of the films many little nice touches, so much bad guys as simply men doing their job, and get back to Elise, even if it means changing the course of his entire life. It’s a nice premise for which Damon and Blunt can cast a likable couple that we generally hope find each other and features a world in which chases are handled by foot and not computers and are filmed in long takes and edited with logic not a blender.

And that’s what you get for your money. Here’s a film that is well acted and made and spreads a little bit of logic in with a little bit of illogic. It doesn’t have the sweep of say Inception, but unlike that film is does have an emotional drive towards some sort of foreseeable end point, which makes it not nearly as compelling but engaging for its own simple, earnest reasons. It won’t provide any food for thought that will justifiably leave anyone discussing it several weeks from now but then again, neither did Inception.

I'll Probably Eat Lunch in This Town Again: A Tale of My Falling Out with the Movie Business (Part 4)

Read Part 1
Part 2
Part 3

So X's three week vacation was over and I was excited to start on some sort of regular daily routine. I won't go into regular detail on everything I did during the day for fear of stretching out this series of posts into infinity but what a normal day looked like was thus: come in, get my lap top set up, check e mail, create a daily list of things to get done with X, make phone calls until around 10:00 am (by which time it is closing time for most foreign territories that fit into that time zone) and then go about other daily tasks such as creating e-blasts (a mass e mail sent to all the distributors in a certain territory to announce either the availability of a title or an upcoming screening at a local film festival), going over deals, and other such things. It wasn't an exciting routine although there always seemed to be something to do and even though we went from 9:00 am till 6:30 pm (which, at $400 a week was less than minimum wage), the day usually went quick.

There are three main tasks that I had was specifically involved with during this time that I was involved in and that I will break down separately: 1) prepping for TIFF 2) penetrating the TV market and 3) prepping a delivery to Australia.

TIFF, although one of the world's biggest film festivals, isn't a major film market for the small guys. One of the nice things about TIFF is that it continues to maintain it's image as the public's film festival which is more about appreciating movies than making deals. That's not to say that deals aren't made there, because they are but it's not as formal as say Cannes or Berlin and it's usually only the big players who carry any weight at TIFF (since it's mostly the big movies that get played there). If you think about AFM or Cannes, sales companies will go there, set up a booth, display their promotional material and hand out screeners to interested buyers (which is what my phone calls were following up on). You won't see this going on at TIFF (it happens but mostly in hotel rooms and lobbys) and TIFF mainly attracts the likes of the Entertainment Ones or The Weinstein Companys; the big guys with money to throw around. Cannes however, because it is mostly all about business will attract all kinds of small and independent companies, like ours, trying to sell all kinds of films.

Therefore, TIFF wasn't as high on our radar as the other major markets were (Cannes, AFM and Berlin, plus Mipcom, which is a TV festival held in Cannes in October). That didn't mean there still wasn't prepping to do as X would be around, going to parties, meeting people, getting tips on what is looking good and seeing if there is anything worth acquiring (X's plan, for the record, was to have three new titles to reveal at Cannes. If his website is correct, he has, since, September, acquired just 1 new title). The problem with this company is that what X basically acquired was the leftovers that no one else wanted. Any company worth their salt already has their claim to the best stuff well in advance of the festivals (although I did spend a brief stint on the phone trying to find out the availability of Fubar 2).

However, one of my jobs was to download a list of all the films that were playing and check them on IMDBpro to see if they were available and if not who had gotten the sales rights and/or what countries did they already have distribution with. The reason for this was twofold. On one hand, it gave X a good idea of what films were available, in which case he would investigate whether or not they were worth checking out as well as, if we saw that one company was distributing such a film and we had one just like it, that, in sales, is what we call an angle.

The other TIFF assignment was to download the patron list to see who was attending, mark off who looked like someone we should talk to and e mail them to try and set up a meetings as well as RSVP to parties and other administrative duties.

TV was where X wanted to be. It was his belief that theatre and video were dying breeds and therefore ondemand and PayTV was where the future was and he wanted a piece of that pie (as well, I think he knew that the majority of the titles we backed were not worth the time to put into theaters and would only appeal to niche audiences on video). Therefore, having not much experience with TV, he left it up to me to dig deep into the TV market, find out who's who and what's what and try to get these movies in front of the people who could get them broadcast. We started with the States with two titles that were available there, although, to be fair, I can't imagine any big channel in the U.S. ever playing either of them. One being sci-fi movie, I targeted sci-fi channels as well as family channels for the other one as it was my opinion that it would play best as a harmless vanilla comedy that wouldn't offend anyone.

But this wasn't good enough for X. He wanted the HBO's, the Turners, the Star TVs, the big, global broadcasters. I had no faith in this exercise but it got me through the day. I called up HBO, many times trying to get through to someone in charge of acquisitions however, anyone who has ever called HBO without a direct name and/or number, knows it's next to impossible to get passed the switchboard. However, I did manage to track down the names and numbers of the acquisitions people for Turner, The Hallmark Movie Channel, as well as some little family channel and AMC. I also managed to set up phone interviews with AMC and Starz (the former of which didn't want the movie but wanted to tell us what they would like to see if we ever came across it and the latter had already seen the movie several years ago and passed on it then but wanted to have the same kind of conversation). It was progress.

As one last little note on this before moving on, I also did manage to get a screener sent to the Spiritual Cinema Circle which is a club that sends out monthly DVDs to members of movies that deal with Spiritual (not religious) subject matter and since our little movie involved God and the ghost of George Burns, I thought, why not? I never stuck around long enough to find out the outcome of any of these connections.

The most interesting thing I did during the remainder of August and the beginning of September was to hunt down all the materials for a delivery. The good news, was that the delivery was to Australia, an English speaking country (which eased the pressure a little) but the bad news is is that the delivery date was fast approaching and we didn't have all the materials. A delivery, in brief, is when you have sold a movie and you are sending the distributors all the materials it will take for them to format the film's release to their region. This includes, but is not limited to, the 5.1 sound, the M&E, a Dialogue Transcript, the Billing Block, the HD Master, the DVD Bonus features (if applicable), the Textless Backgrounds, etc.

Let me do a quick breakdown: 5.1 speaks for itself; M&E stands for "music and effects" which is exactly that, but without the inclusion of the dialogue (foreign countries need this for dubbing); a dialogue transcript is a print-out of all the dialogue and at what time it occurs in the film (which is needed for creating subtitles); the Billing Block is what you see on the bottom of posters where all the names of who did what are listed, HD Master I assume speaks for itself, as does DVD bonus features; Textless Background is the entire film without any text inserts. This is needed because, if a film starts with an image and over top reads: "Once upon a time in a galaxy far, far away..." that will need to be translated into the country's language and put back in into the finished film.

We had exactly none of this. The problem was that the filmmakers behind the film were young first-timers who didn't really know what they were doing and since their movie had more or less made them all the money it was going to, they didn't really seem to care anymore. They had said that they didn't have any of the materials and put us in touch with a nice and helpful man named Oliver at Roadside Attractions in LA who were looking after the North American DVD release. Oliver gave us one-time access to the master at Fotokem so that we could make a copy of it but said that all of the other materials he had sent back to the filmmakers on burned DVDs. Despite this, they still claimed that didn't have it and didn't know anything about it. It was a brutal back and forth that was about the equivalent of clubbing seals. After Oliver had kindly, despite his business, offered to burn us what he had (the 5.1 and bonus features), the filmmakers decided they did have that after all and sent it to us.

Fine, now what about the M&E (which, once again, wasn't as important due to it being sent to an English speaking country, but would still be needed in the future) and Dialogue Transcript? The filmmakers sent me on another wild goose chase to another company in New York who did not have a dialogue transcript but directed me to another man in another company who might, as he had created the Spanish subtitles for the DVD. He didn't exactly have a complete dialogue transcript but he sent us his notes anyway and they would do for now. At this point we also had 4 people who were telling me that no M&E had ever been created. Fine enough, we'd do it and charge the filmmakers.

This task was done. So was I...

To Be Continued...The Conclusion Awaits

The King Spoke and He Said: The Oscars Kind of Sucked This Year

• 2010 will be remembered as the year that nothing worth remembering happened at the Oscars.
• Anne Hathaway could very well be a great Oscar host with lots of life and energy (if she'd give up the oh my gosh I'm hosting the Oscars references), but what was with James Franco? He looked like that if he didn't go backstage and start cooking up a shot he was going to go into withdrawl.
• I think the Academy found their host next year in Kirk Douglas.
• It's sad that the most talked about thing this year was Melissa Leo dropping the F-bomb.
• There was a moment when Wally Pfister was accepting his award when he thanked Christopher Nolan for being his master and Nolan half smiled as if to say, "Yeah thanks even though it should be me up there."
• Apparently Ophrah talking about the human condition did nothing for Joel Cohen who decided he'd rather pick his ear than listen.
• Randy Newman has been nominated for Best Song 20 times and won twice which is kind of ironic because he essentially made a career out of writing the same song over and over again (to be fair, his songs were one of the things that kept the Princess and the Frog from being great). Out of four nominees, only the 127 Hours song had any personality at all. However, in his attempt to be "good TV" Newman did give one of the funniest and lightest speeches.
• Tom Hooper managed to make thanking his mom actually sound sweet and meaningful.
• I have no idea who this kid who won best short feature is, but he's certainly going places.
• Susanne Bier won an Oscar. This makes me happy. She's one of my favourite directors and doesn't get enough credit for what she does.
• You can tell Aaron Sorkin is a great writer. He gave the most literate and confident speech. He reminds me a bit of David Mamet.
• I desperately wanted the Social Network to win more awards just so there could be more hilarious cutaway shots of David Fincher looking completely unimpressed as people thanked him.
• Was it just me or were Justin Timberlake and Mila Kunis really awkward to watch?
• The opening montage was so uninspired that I thought for a second I was watching Saturday Night Live
• The opening monologue wasn't much better. Where is Carrie Fischer when you need her?
• Billy Crystal managed to revive the show a little and a video was played of Bob Hope doing one of my favourite Oscar lines "Or as it's called at my house: passover," but this was awkwardly melded into a way to introduce Robert Downey Jr. and Jude Law
• Speaking of: if there has to be 2 hosts, these 2 get my vote for next year.
• Since when have the honorary Oscar recipients ever been brought on stage and not allowed to make a speech?
• How did David O. Russell and Christian Bale work together without anyone getting hurt?
• I got 2 wrong this year and 3 wrong last year. I'm getting better