The ultimate misunderstood mum

By Brian D. Johnson - Friday, October 24, 2008 at 12:00 AM - 0 Comments

Angelina Jolie is Hollywood’s most famous wife and mother, and if we can believe the tabloids, her Miracle-Gro family is forever on the verge of being torn asunder by one calamity or another. But those scenarios pale next to the real-life scenarios of the shattered women she’s been portraying onscreen lately. In last year’s A Mighty Heart, Jolie played Mariane Pearl, whose journalist husband, Daniel Pearl, was beheaded by terrorists in Pakistan when she was five months pregnant. Now in Clint Eastwood’s Changeling, based on another true story of abduction and murder, Jolie plays Christine Collins, a single mother and switchboard operator whose nine-year-old son, Walter, vanished from her home in a suburb of Los Angeles in 1928.

The twist in this stranger-than-fiction tale is that five months later the LAPD finds a boy who claims to be Walter—and “reunites” mother and son with great fanfare in a staged photo-op for the press. The child is an imposter. But when Collins tries to point out the error, the police insist she’s wrong and try to silence her to avoid embarrassment. A Presbyterian firebrand, Rev. Gustav Briegleb (John Malkovich), champions her cause from his pulpit radio broadcast. Turning the press against her, the police brand her delusional and have her forcefully committed to a mental institution. But Collins persists in her fight for justice, eventually helping bring down a viciously corrupt LAPD.

This real-life fable of a pre-feminist heroine battling a sinister conspiracy is so outrageous it’s hard to believe it happened—and has not already been minted as legend. It’s a true buried treasure. Screenwriter J. Michael Straczynski, a former journalist, stumbled across the case when a source at city hall asked him to look at some old records that were about to be dumped into the incinerator. He unearthed the story of the cover-up, and of the serial killer who murdered Walter—his identity did not come to light until after Collins’s death in 1935. When Eastwood received the Changeling script, it was pasted with newspaper clippings—as if Straczynski (known for writing TV science fiction and Marvel comics) shared his heroine’s need to prove the story was not some wild invention.

Film Reviews: 'Wanted' and 'Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed'

By Brian D. Johnson - Thursday, June 26, 2008 at 4:49 PM - 0 Comments

Summertime. The living is easy and the popcorn is high. And the time is right for . . . intelligent design? That’s just my lazy way of introducing two unrelated movies about cult-like crazies who harbour some preposterous conspiracy theories. Neither movie makes much sense. But in the case of Wanted, an action blockbuster starring Angelina Jolie as an über-assassin working for a mystical fraternity, who cares? It’s a wild ride, and Angelina looks and behaves like the scandalous bad girl we want her to be despite all those children and all that charity work. Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed is a documentary polemic arguing that believers in intelligent design (i.e. creationists) are being persecuted by “Big Science” and that theories of Darwinian evolution helped spawn Hitler and the Holocaust. There’s not much action in Expelled, but it made me want to throw things at the screen.

Wanted

Judging by the poster and the trailer, you’d be inclined to think of this as the new Angelina Jolie movie. But as it turns out, Wanted is more like the new James McAvoy movie. The plucky star of Atonement and The Last King of Scotland stars as the story’s protagonist, a downtrodden white-collar weakling named Wesley who is rescued from his nowhere job in an office cubicle and recruited into a secret fraternity of assassins. But hey, you could also call it a Timur Bekmambetov movie. . . Timur who? Continue…

Cannes Encore

By Brian D. Johnson - Monday, June 9, 2008 at 10:21 AM - 0 Comments

For two weeks each May, a quaint town on the French Riviera becomes a Hollywood fantasy in the flesh. Throughout the 2008 Cannes Film Festival, I blogged video clips. In the aftermath, I’ve edited a montage of highlights, an impressionist trip through the beauty, vulgarity, hysteria and chaos that is Cannes.

Film Reviews: 'Kung Fu Panda', 'Mongol'

By Brian D. Johnson - Thursday, June 5, 2008 at 5:35 PM - 0 Comments

The weekend’s big movie for fully grown children isYou Don’t Mess With the Zohan, the new Judd Apatow-branded comedy starring Adam Sandler as an Israeli commando who becomes a Manhattan hairdresser. But your faithful correspondent hasn’t seen it. Blame it on Cannes. The film was screened while I was flying home. Then my immune system promptly crashed and burned, leaving me too ill to attend a second Toronto screening. Lesson learned: I vow to never again attempt surviving on four hours sleep a night for two weeks running. I did find the time to watch the Zohan trailer, however, and it seems to require no further explanation. Word on the street from friends who did preview the entire movie: You Don’t Mess with the Zohan is more of an Adam Sandler movie than a Judd Apatow movie.

For those in the mood for an old-fashioned action picture, this weekend offers two choices: Kung Fu Panda, an animated feature for the whole family, and Mongol, a period epic for those who don’t mind their popcorn splattered with a little blood and gore. Both exploit the ancient warrior codes of the East, and are laden with philosophical aphorisms. Both also happen to be rare examples of entertainment that’s relatively irony-free.

Kung Fu Panda

I caught the afternoon premiere of this animated blockbuster as a break from all the dire and serious drama in competition at Cannes. The previous day, I’d watched Jack Black, who voices the panda, cavort on the Carlton pier with a gang in bear suits. (‘Kung Fu Pandering’ blog & video). I’d also saw Black hold court with co-stars Angelina Jolie and Dustin Hoffman at a zoo-like press conference for the film, where Black played the class clown, a pregnant and regal Angelina talked about having children, and Hoffman, the old sage , lamented the current state of the industry, saying that “Hollywood in the 70s was making the same kind of movies that the indies are making today.”

And Kung Fu Panda? Well, for a kiddie animation spectacle I’d give it more than a passing grade. There are some terrific set pieces of animated martial arts, notably one involving chopsticks. There’s a fabulous escape scene that involves a vast, diabolically designed dungeon. The filmmakers, who are keen martial arts fans, were aiming to mix the grace of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon with the slapstick mayhem of Kung Fu Hustle. And they’ve succeeded up to a point.

But the script is rather ham-fisted and moralistic. The picture lacks the all-ages wit and dazzle of a masterpiece like Ratatouille. Perhaps we’ve become too picky with animation. Now that we’ve seen what’s possible, we want to be blown away by more than visual virtuosity. We want to see a film that seems in and of itself miraculous, reinventing the genre with the kind of magic that makes you wonder how on earth it found it way to to the screen. Kung Fu Panda is not on that level.

The story revolves around a clumsy, overweight panda named Po (Jack Black), a geeky fan of martial arts who is resigned to a future in his family’s noodle shop—until a fluke designates him as a chosen warrior to fulfill an ancient prophecy. A jaded guru (Dustin Hoffman) has the job of training Po so he can fulfill his destiny to become a kung fu master. Angelina Jolie, Seth Rogen, Lucy Liu, David Cross and Jackie Chang voice a menagerie of jealous rivals called the Furious Five. They’re a weird mix—from a tiger (Jolie) to a praying mantis (Rogen). Deadwood‘s Ian McShane brings black-hearted menace to the the role of villain. (Try to imagine Hannibal Lecter as a snow leopard.) Among the actors, Black may have found his ideal incarnation as an lard-ass panda. And Hoffman, who has somehow avoided voicing animation up until now, delivers the movie’s stand-out performance, filling out the gruff stereotype of his role with the kind of idiosyncratic detail that has become his signature.

The script is full of empowering advice for nerds, underachievers and fat kids. It’s a familiar message—with enough effort, anyone can be a superhero. I suppose the same doctrine informed Ratatouille, and countless other cartoon features. But in this case, the script lacks the quicksilver dexterity of the visuals. There’s not much subtlety in a movie that puts an obese panda bear with a eating disorder through kung fu boot camp—first dangling food in front of him as an incentive, and then showing how, once he becomes absorbed in the task at hand, he’ll lose interest in stuffing his face.

Mongol

This ambitious epic from Russian auteur Sergei Bodrov is just as unsubtle in its own way. But I found this heroic epic about Ghenghis Khan more rewarding. Perhaps that’s because it’s not kiddie fare. For a closer look at Mongol , go to my piece in this week’s magazine: Ghenghis, patron saint of the steppe

He's no Angelina

By Brian D. Johnson - Wednesday, May 28, 2008 at 9:00 AM - 0 Comments

For 12 days each May, Cannes plays host to the world’s most extravagant film festival, and those of us who enter its champagne bubble on the French Riviera become temporarily deluded that nothing on the planet matters more than movies. Yet there’s a special kick in encountering luminaries in Cannes who are not movie stars, as if their real-world celebrity comes in a harder currency. In 2006, Al Gore relaunched his career at the festival for the premiere of An Inconvenient Truth. And this year, two of the more exotic apparitions on the red carpet were American boxing thug Mike Tyson and Argentine soccer god Diego Maradona. As subjects of adoring documentaries, these two fallen superstars both burned out in a cocaine-fuelled blaze of bad behaviour, sought redemption as champions of Third World revolution — and by bizarre coincidence, both now have the face of Che Guevara tattooed on their bodies.

The guy has been dead for 40 years, but in Cannes this year no star was more talked about, or elusive, than Che. The hero of the Cuban revolution, and the world’s most ubiquitous T-shirt icon, is now the subject of a controversial 4½-hour movie by American director Steven Soderbergh.
Continue…

Saving the world with Maradona, Mao, Angelina and Clint

By Brian D. Johnson - Tuesday, May 20, 2008 at 10:02 PM - 0 Comments

It’s well past midnight, as usual. I still seem to be writing on Toronto time, blogging when I should be sleeping. Just passed by a crowd cheering for soccer god Maradona as he mounted the red stairs with filmmaker Emir Kusturica for the late-night premiere of Maradona by Kusturica. As the title indicates, the Serbian auteur gives himself almost equal as Maradona in this documentary, which serves as a mutual admiration vanity project for both. Makes a curious companion piece to Tyson. They’re both stories of athletes who abused massive celebrity, tumbled into drugs, then salvaged some sort of redemption by bonding charisma with revolutionary icons like Mao and Che. Both these docs are essentially self-portraits, but Tyson is far superior, because its subject is so much tougher on himself.

From what I could see, I was only North American journalist at the press conference for Maradona. Asked to compare himself to Tyson, the soccer god shrugged. “I am a football player, he’s a boxer. He lives in suffering, I live in joy. That is above what distinguishes us.” Comparing Maradona to both Mao and Marilyn Monroe, Kusturica said, if Maradona “hadn’t be a footballer, he would have been a revolutionary.”

I asked both of them if Maradona was indeed a god, as the film seems to suggest. Kursturica gave a long and involved answer about how his divine energy originates from a pre-Christian “zero time,” and about his “radiation”—”his power to radiate wherever you go with him.” Weighing the matter of his own godliness, Maradona said, “The only comment I can make is that I don’t feel I am God. There is only one God, and it’s not me. People have faith in me like a god. And if people want to consider me as a god, I’m not going to contradict them.”

Whatever. The soccer messiah and his auteur fan made made a sweet couple as they bounced and dribbled a soccer ball on the red carpet for the camera

It has been a long, crazy day. Began with bolting out of bed after sleeping through the alarm. Did a 10-minute sprint to the Palais for the 8:30 a.m. press screening of Clint Eastwood’s L’Echange. That’s what they’re calling his movie in French. They’re still waffling over the English title, which is listed as Changeling in the Cannes program book but asThe Exchange in the studio press kit.

Clint’s latest opus is based on a true story of heinous cover by a corrupt Los Angeles police force in 1928. Angelina Jolie stars as working-class single mother Christina Collins, who’s nine year son is abducted. Five months after the boy’s disappearance, the police try claim to have found the boy, and try to pull off a public relations coup by re-united him with his mother. Problem is, it’s not the right boy. When Collins tries to protest the fact, they slam her into a nightmarish mental institution. and thus begins a woman’s crusade for justice, with the help of a liberal evangelist played by John Malkovich. Canadian Colm Feore plays the L.A.P.D.’s corrupt police chief. And as the plot blossoms, the horrors of the mental institution are matched by details of a serial killing rampage that left 20 children dead.

Good and evil are painted with such extremes in this drama that, if it were fiction, you’d have trouble swallowing it. But there’s nothing subtle about this kind of crime. Besides, Eastwood prefers to serve his morality straight-up, in clean, unambiguous strokes. His style is always a bit starchy. Amid the low-pressure system of gritty urban realism that dominates the films in competition at Cannes, the lavish period detail of this Hollywood epic shimmers with artifice. But hey, it’s a movie, after all, an old fashioned melodrama about a noble woman battling a vile conspiracy, and it’s quite a story. It went over pretty well here. This is the first film we’ve seen in competition that is both a Palme d’Or contender and a picture people might actually pay to see.

Jolie, meanwhile, gives the kind of bravura performance that’s almost guaranteed to register at Oscar time. Personally, I preferred her work last year in Michael Winterbottom’s A Mighty Heart. There again, as the widow of terrorist victim Daniel Pearl, she played a woman who grapples with authorities after losing a loved one to abduction under horrific circumstances. But it was a small, underrated film that slipped under Oscar’s radar. It’s much more likely she will be recognized for Changeling, or whatever it ends up being called.

At the Clint/Angelina press conference, I asked Jolie about the almost proximity between these two anguished characters, Marianne Pearl and Christina Collins. . .

For more of Brian D. Johnson’s videos go to http://www.youtube.com/bdjfilms. All 2008 Cannes footage is shot on a Sony HDR-SR12 camcorder, on loan courtesy of Sony Canada.

Caged heat and two pregnant Angelina Jolies

By Brian D. Johnson - Thursday, May 15, 2008 at 8:15 PM - 0 Comments

If the first two days are any indication, the Cannes programmers may be laying down some thematic head trips this year. Three of the first three dramas in official selection have been set in prisons. First came Blindness, which takes place in quarantine concentration camp. This morning we saw Leonera (Lion’s Den), a movie from Argentina about a woman who gives birth to a child and raises him in prison for several years. And the sidebar program, Un Certain Regard, opened tonight with Hunger, a provocative feature directing debut by British artist Steve McQueen. It tells the story of the IRA’s Bobby Sands leading a hunger strike in Northern Ireland’s Maze Prison in 1981, which claimed 10 lives including his own.

Leonera offers an eye-opening look into the real phenomenon of prisons that double as nurseries. With toddlers swinging from the cell doors, this gives a whole new meaning to the phrase “monkey bars.” Leonera a gritty, earnest drama that mixes breast-feeding and screaming infants into more familiar scenarios of lesbian romance, shower assaults, strip-searches and bonfire riots. The film stars Argentine actress Martina Gusman as a woman charged with murdering her boyfriend who enters prison pregnant. Skinny and catlike with a model’s body, Gusman looks quite out of place among her sisterhood of butch inmates. And she looks so much like Angelina Jolie that it’s spooky. By the time she’s getting her shoulders tattooed, the resonance is downright distracting.

So it was very weird to see the real Angelina Jolie in the flesh, and very pregnant, just hours later—holding court at a press conference for Kung Fu Panda with Jack Black and Dustin Hoffman.

That’s my clip, shot on the little HDR-SR12s loaned to us by Sony Canada. But a print journalist, I don’t have permission to shoot the actual press conference. So here are highlights from accredited TV media, shot by the boys with big cameras at the back of the room:

Photo Gallery: Toronto Film Festival 2007

By Jeff Harris - Friday, September 14, 2007 at 5:23 PM - 0 Comments

The stars just seem to shine brighter north of the border. Exclusive pictures of celebrities on the red carpet and in their own habitat (aka hotel rooms) at the 2007 Toronto Film Festival. Check out Matt Damon, Jennifer Garner, George Clooney and Brad Pitt — erm, with an itchy nose.

Click here for exclusive photo gallery.