Reeling

The 2009 Borscht Film Festival launches tonight

By Miamians, for Miamians: That's the credo behind the 2009 Borscht Film Festival, which will unspool short films made entirely in South Florida by local filmmakers at 7 p.m. Saturday at downtown Miami's Gusman Center for the Performing Arts.

Now in its sixth year, the festival was created by students at New World School of the Arts as a showcase for works created by like-minded aspiring filmmakers. This year, the festival joins forces with the Miami World Cinema Center (MWCC) in Wynwood, the not-for-profit film studio designed to nurture and assist the local moviemaking scene.

At Saturday's event, MWCC will premiere CCCV Stories, five commissioned shorts chosen from more than 100 proposals. Each film is set in a specific Miami neighborhood and tells an only-in-Miami story. Among them: Of Metrorails and Megasaurs, in which Norah Solarzano uses live action and experimental animation to tell the story of a little girl's first visit to downtown Miami; Day n Night Out, set in Liberty City and Homestead, written by playwright Tarell Alvin McCraney and directed by Lucas Leyva, is about a young man and the seemingly insurmountable obstacles of his life, and Xemoland, Daniel Cardenas' animated tale of a 7-year-old boy who becomes lost in an imaginary world.

All the winners were directed by local filmmakers under the age of 30. The Cinema Center provided initial $5,000 budgets, which the filmmakers parlayed into bigger budgets by working with local vendors and in-kind donations.

"Orson Welles was 24 when he made Citizen Kane," says Patrick deBokay, founder and CEO of the Cinema Center. "The young are the future of the images of tomorrow. Our center, and this festival, are a way to give young people of Miami the passion and the will to make films."

For more information about the 2009 Borscht Film Festival, go here.

Transplanting ''The Road'' to the screen, carefully

Halfway through the filming of The Road, director John Hillcoat made a difficult decision: No matter what, he was going to remain faithful to Cormac McCarthy's novel about a father and son traveling across a post-apocalyptic landscape -- even if that meant shooting a seemingly unfilmable scene involving cannibals and a fat, juicy baby.

``I fought like tooth and nail to film that scene,'' Hillcoat says. ``I argued `This is what we've signed on for, and we're not going to shy away from a single thing.' And I won. We shot the scene. I even kept it in an early cut of the film. And then I fought like hell to take it out. How ironic is that?''

During editing -- a lengthy process that caused the film, which opened Wednesday, to miss its original release date by a year -- Hillcoat discovered that transplanting the essence of McCarthy's novel to the screen was much more complicated than simply treating it as a script, the approach Joel and Ethan Coen used when adapting No Country for Old Men.

``When you physicalize some of the stuff in the book and put it up on the screen, the movie takes on a different dynamic,'' Hillcoat says. ``My goal was always to stay focused on the father and son, and the more of that horrific stuff you have the more you take the spotlight off their emotional journey.

``I think it's true of all films: You have to work with restraint. It's so easy to get carried away. Actors love to chew up scenery sometimes, and directors get lost in special effects and big action scenes. Film is a powerful medium, and I'm always battling to find the right balance and rein in.

``At the end of the day, the movie still has enough of those chilling things: The cannibal house, the road gangs, the collapsing trees. That's enough, I think. To have any more, the movie would have become about something else.''

 Hillcoat had interpreted The Road as a love story between father and son from the moment he first read the novel in galley form. Producer Nick Wechsler (Drugstore Cowboy, The Player, The Time Traveler's Wife) sent the Australian filmmaker the book on the strength of his previous film The Proposition, a violent and unsparing Western set in the Australian outback that Hillcoat made, in part, as homage to an earlier McCarthy novel, Blood Meridian.

``I didn't know about the connection to Blood Meridian until much later,'' Wechsler says. ``But The Proposition very much had a [Sam] Peckinpah quality, and I saw The Road as a Peckinpah movie -- men and women surviving under difficult circumstances, struggling between being civilized and being outlaws. Good versus evil. Very primal stuff. The examination of humanity and morality in The Proposition was very applicable to what I thought we needed for The Road. I had met him and gotten an idea of who he was and how he thought as a filmmaker. So when I read The Road, he was the first person to pop into my head.''

For Hillcoat, the McCarthy novel presented the chance of a lifetime.

 ``To have this kind of material land on your lap was an amazing stroke of luck,'' he says. ``And when I read it, I wasn't prepared for the emotional impact it had on me. The incredible visualization and authenticity of the apocalypse was something I would have expected from McCarthy. But the story was also so poignant and real and profound. The only thing that gave me pause was the practicality of finding a young actor who could play the son -- a boy who had a maturity and openness and didn't have any kind of show-business precociousness, because that would be the kiss of death on this material.''

Hillcoat found his ideal actor in 11-year-old Kodi Smit-McPhee. For the role of his father, Hillcoat turned to Viggo Mortensen, another hardcore McCarthy fan who from the outset understood the project's challenges.

``This is the most faithful adaptation -- not just in spirit, like Lord of the Rings was, but also in word and emotion -- that I have ever seen,'' Mortensen says. ``The challenge for me was to convey the man's interior monologue as it is described in the book without words, because film is a visual medium. You have to trust that if you feel it as an actor, and you're living those thoughts, they will come across to the audience.

``The man is thinking about his wife all the time and living with the accumulated regret of his life experience. Kids tend to accept where they are more than adults do, no matter how hard their circumstances are. Adults regret and fret about the future. To get all that stuff across was much harder than the physical demands of shooting in the cold and the wet.''

Hillcoat says he felt the mounting pressure of doing justice to McCarthy's novel after the book won the Pulitzer Prize and caught the attention of Oprah Winfrey, whose recommendation turned it into a bestseller. After the original release date had come and gone, rumors swirled that the movie was in trouble and its relatively unknown director in over his head. But Hillcoat says the delay was the best thing that could have happened.

``I knew every rifle was going to be aimed at me,'' he says. ``That's part and parcel in adapting a book that is revered. But the original release date was over-ambitious and unreachable. It was a very long and delicate editing process to get the balance of the flashbacks right, the presence of the cannibals and the pressure upon the man and the boy to constantly survive. We had all sorts of issues with birds flying into the background of shots that required special effects to remove them.

``My job was to stay focused on the task at hand and concentrate on making the best film we possibly could,'' Hillcoat says. ``We could have released the film earlier this year, but it's really not a summer movie. And I can't think of a more auspicious date than Thanksgiving for this film. We're getting something fully realized as opposed to rushed and half assed.''

Holiday movie preview

I'm reposting the holiday movie preview that ran in today's paper here, for easy reference. There are at least two films I really want to see opening every weekend between now and the end of the year. And I'm finally starting to get a little stoked for Avatar.

DEC. 4

Antichrist: Just in time for the holidays comes Lars Von Trier's ruckus-causing scandal about a husband and wife (Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg) who deal with the death of their young son by holing up in a cabin in the woods and doing exceedingly bad things to each other. I've seen Antichrist and can confirm that little Hostel punk Eli Roth has got nothing on Von Trier. Chaos reigns, indeed.

Armored: Matt Dillon, Jean Reno, Laurence Fishburne and Fred Ward are among the employees of an armored-transport security firm who cook up the ultimate scam: Rip off the company, and no one gets hurt. But everybody knows there's no such thing as the perfect crime. Nimrod Antal (Vacancy) directs the mayhem.

Brothers: Danish director Susanne Bier's acclaimed 2004 drama gets a Hollywood remake. Jake Gyllenhaal stars as a man who comforts the wife (Natalie Portman) of his older brother (Tobey Maguire), a U.S. Marine reportedly killed in Afghanistan. But the reports turn out to be wrong, and after the missing soldier returns home, the brothers must readjust their lives. Jim Sheridan (In America, The Boxer) directs from a script by David Benioff (The 25th Hour).

Everybody's Fine: Robert DeNiro attempts a role he hasn't played in ages -- that of an ordinary man -- in this story about a widower who heads out on a road trip to reconnect with his three grown and estranged children (Sam Rockwell, Kate Beckinsale and Drew Barrymore).

Transylmania: This comedy is about a group of crazy college students who sign up for a semester abroad in Transylvania, where the kegs aren't filled with beer. Haven't these kids ever watched Dracula?

Up in the Air: Director Jason Reitman (Thank You For Smoking, Juno) cements his reputation as one of Hollywood's best young filmmakers with this superb drama about a man (George Clooney) who hopes to rack up 10 million frequent-flyer miles as he travels from city to city, helping companies downsize their staffs and telling people they are being laid off. As of this writing, Up in the Air is my favorite movie of the year, although I still have a lot of films left to see.

DEC. 11

Invictus: Clint Eastwood directs the story of how the newly elected Nelson Mandela (Morgan Freeman) used the 1995 Rugby World Cup as a vehicle to unite his country. Matt Damon co-stars as the captain of South Africa's rugby team. Sure, the movie sounds corny and formulaic, but the Eastwood factor cannot be discounted.

Me and Orson Welles: Richard Linklater (Slacker) directs this adaptation of Robert Kaplow's novel about the behind-the-stage shenanigans during a Mercury Theatre staging of Julius Caesar directed by a young, pre-Citizen Kane Orson Welles (Christian McKay) in 1937. Ben Chaplin, Claire Danes and Zac Efron are among the performers joining the romantic mischief offstage.

The Princess and the Frog: The Walt Disney Co. tries a radical experiment -- hey, let's make a cartoon that's not computer-animated! -- with this old-school, pen-and-ink 'toon inspired by the classic fairy tale transplanted to Jazz-Age New Orleans and boasting the first African-American heroine in Disney animation history. Directed by The Little Mermaid team of Ron Clements and John Musker.

DEC. 18

Avatar: James Cameron's long-awaited return to the director's chair since 1997's Titanic has already been so hyped the movie feels as if it came out a year ago. Cameron promises you've never seen anything like this adventure, a hybrid of live action and computer animation centering on a war between humanoid aliens on a distant planet. Sam Worthington, Zoe Saldana, Sigourney Weaver and Michelle Rodriguez co-star. See it in IMAX 3D, or don't see it at all.

Did You Hear About the Morgans?: Hotshot Manhattanites (Sarah Jessica Parker and Hugh Grant) whose marriage is on the brink witness a mob hit and are relocated for their protection to a tiny town in Wyoming. But just because they are running for their lives doesn't mean they can't still hate each other.

DEC. 23

Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakuel: The most annoying computer-animated film ever made now has a sequel with the most annoying title ever conceived.

DEC. 25

A Single Man: Befitting a year that saw so many movies about fashion, famed designer Tom Ford makes his filmmaking debut by writing and directing this drama about a man (Colin Firth) reeling from the sudden death of his partner. Julianne Moore, Matthew Goode and Nicholas Hoult co-star.

Broken Embraces: Writer-director Pedro Almodovar's latest melodrama tells of a former filmmaker (Lluis Homar), blinded in a car crash 14 years before, who has become a screenwriter. News of the death of one of his former producers rekindles memories of his affair with an aspiring actress (Penelope Cruz).

It's Complicated: Nancy Meyers (Something's Gotta Give) wrote and directed this comedy about a divorced woman (Meryl Streep) dating an architect (Steve Martin) who, after a night of dinner and drinks, finds herself falling all over again for her ex-husband (Alec Baldwin, whose performance has generated early Oscar buzz).

The Lovely Bones: Director Peter Jackson (The Lord of the Rings) takes on another beloved bestseller with fantasy overtones -- Alice Sebold's novel narrated by a murdered little girl (Saoirse Ronan) who looks down from heaven and watches her family (Mark Wahlberg, Rachel Weisz and Susan Sarandon) mourn her death and deal with the void she left. Happy holidays!

Nine: Daniel Day-Lewis is the world-famous film director having a crisis of conscience, and Penelope Cruz, Nicole Kidman, Kate Hudson, Marion Cotillard and Judi Dench are among the women in his life in director Rob (Chicago) Marshall's adaptation of the smash Broadway musical loosely inspired by the Fellini classic 8 ½.

Sherlock Holmes: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's stuffy, pipe-smoking literary detective gets a 21st century makeover in director Guy (Snatch) Ritchie's action-heavy, big-budget reimagining starring Robert Downey Jr. as Holmes and Jude Law as his trusty assistant Watson.

The Young Victoria: Jean-Marc Vallee (C.R.A.Z.Y.) directs this period drama centering on the turbulent early reign of Queen Victoria (Emily Blunt) and her affair with Prince Albert (Rupert Friend). Merry Christmas, Anglophiles!

The Shining Part 2?

A sequel to The Shining sounds like a terrible and contrived idea to me. I don't really care what Danny Torrance is up to as a fortysomething, or how his psychic powers have developed over the years. One of the great things about the book is that Danny's clairvoyance turns out to be a kind of MacGuffin - an excuse, really, for the ghosts that haunt the Overlook Hotel to cut loose and seriously mess with the minds of the poor Torrance family.

Stephen King is a radically different writer today than he was back in 1977. Even though I enjoyed his latest novel, his books no longer have the snap and pace that made reading The Shining such a compulsive experience (I don't know anybody who didn't devour that novel when they read it). Besides, let's face it: The Shining doesn't really belong to King anymore anyway. It hasn't, for decades.

Now and forever, The Shining belongs to Stanley Kubrick, whose film adaptation left such a seminal footprint, the movie has grown to eclipse the book that spawned it. Everybody knows Danny's encounter with a rotting corpse happens in room 237 (like in the movie) and not room 217 (like in the book). Everybody knows the Overlook's garden contains a giant maze (like in the movie) and not topiary animals (like in the book).

Even a passing mention of The Shining makes me think immediately of Wendy Carlos' sinister score - music laden with all sorts of ominous things to come - and the film's opening credits, which manage to make helicopter vistas of a scenic mountain range seem scary. And I haven't even mentioned Jack Nicholson's performance as Jack Torrance, one of the most iconic pieces of acting ever committed to film.

I don't see how anything King could come up with anything striking enough to overcome our memories of Kubrick's Shining, which made some fairly radical departures from the book and has become the de facto version of the story. Even King's proposed title for the sequel, Doctor Sleep, already feels like a let-down.

During the book reading in Toronto where he discussed the sequel, King said he wasn't completely committed to the new novel. "Maybe if I keep talking about it I won’t have to write it." Keep talking, Stephen. And leave The Shining alone.

  

Review: ''The Road''

The first thing you notice is that there's too much music. Nick Cave's intrusive score feels pushy and overstated - the opposite of the eerie silence Cormac McCarthy achieved in the hushed pages of his novel about a father and son wandering a post-apocalyptic wasteland.

Fans of The Road have been awaiting the movie, originally due last November, with equal parts anticipation and dread. Unlike McCarthy's No Country for Old Men, originally conceived as a screenplay with a driving, unstoppable narrative, The Road is largely plotless: Almost nothing actually happens. But the novel's end-of-the-world scenario and shattering emotional impact still felt ideal for film - so long as the project was handled by people who grasped the greatness of the novel lurking beneath McCarthy's spare prose.

So that relentless score, combined with the awful trailers that played in theaters earlier this year, initially confirms fears that director John Hillcoat (The Proposition) and screenwriter Joe Penhall have taken a superficial reading of McCarthy's novel. Gradually, though, the film changes your mind. The Road still feels like an adaptation of a better, more profound work. But the filmmakers capture enough of the book's essence - and the power of its knockout, transcendent ending - to more than justify the movie's existence.

The Road unfolds in an ashen, barren United States years after the bombs fell. Animals are long dead; the few remaining trees stand dried out and charred. Almost nothing green or brown or blue - nature's colors - exists. Even though everything is gray, cold, crumbling and rotting, some people still prowl, mostly in packs.

Cannibalism, prevalent in this world in which there's nothing left to eat, is the reason an unnamed man (Viggo Mortensen) so fiercely guards the two bullets left in his revolver: One for him; the other for his young son (Kodi Smit-McPhee), in case they should be captured by predators before they reach the sea. In brief flashbacks, we get glimpses of the man's life with his wife (Charlize Theron) before and after the apocalypse. But only glimpses. All that matters now is his son. "If he is not the word of God," the man thinks, "then God never spoke."

Like the novel, The Road essentially is a work of horror, and Hillcoat does not shy away from depicting most (though not all) of the extreme violence McCarthy describes. But although The Road is, in premise, not all that different from countless zombie pictures in which survivors must navigate a world overrun by flesh-eaters, Hillcoat never allows the tale's genre trappings to overcome his characters.

The most indelible moments in The Road are not the gruesome scenes but small, telling exchanges among people trying to make sense of their new reality, such as the father and son's encounter with an old blind man (Robert Duvall) who is basically waiting to die or their discovery of a family that had committed suicide. "Why?" asks the uncomprehending boy. "You know why," his father answers.

 Mortensen is good at capturing the man's ferocious determination to survive in a world that has given up. But 12-year-old Smit-McPhee is even better as the boy, born after the apocalypse, who has never known a different life. The movie ultimately rests on his wide eyes and small frame, and Smit-McPhee's performance in the devastating final scene propels the film past its flaws. Like McCarthy's book, The Road is dark, bleak and nightmarish but also stirring and beautiful and optimistic: As long as life remains, the movie argues, there is always hope.

Review: ''Ninja Assassin''

You don't go into a movie called Ninja Assassin expecting a hell of a lot, but this shockingly disjointed and relentlessly dull picture can't even deliver the martial-arts kick its title so plainly promises. The latest misfire in the ongoing career meltdown of The Matrix creators Larry and Andy Wachowski, who produced the film for their V For Vendetta director James McTeigue, Ninja Assassin is awash in computer-generated blood, redundant flashbacks (the movie may set a new record) and bad lighting that renders several of the fight scenes literally impossible to follow.

Even the well-lit showdowns between the titular hero Raizo (played by Korean pop star Rain) and the clan of evil ninjas-for-hire known as the Ozunu who raised him and are now trying to kill him, aren't all that exciting. Rain is a singer and dancer and obviously not a martial artist, so the plentiful swordfights and blade-and-chain duels and kung-fu standoffs all feel overly staged and choreographed in a way the fights in Bruce Lee movies - or even in Kill Bill - never did.

The Ninja Assassin screenplay was originally penned by Matthew Sand and, at the request of the Wachowskis, rewritten by Babylon 5 creator J. Michael Straczynski in a hasty 53 hours, which helps to explain why the movie borders on the incomprehensible. The plot, which includes a Europol agent (Naomie Harris) out to investigate the Ozunu, is so thin and schlocky the script feels as if it had been tossed off in . . . well, 53 hours.

Most inexcusable: even the gore is terrible. I understand why filmmakers gravitate toward computer-generated imagery when dealing with creatures and monsters. But why are so many directors now starting to use CGI blood? Is it just too much to ask to slop around some karo syrup on the set? Too much work to wipe up between takes?

The violence in Ninja Assassin feels as fake as the kung-fu, a fitting condition for a movie in which nothing feels real, and nothing is ever at stake - except, perhaps, for the viewer's wakefulness. Do not, under any circumstances, watch Ninja Assassin while operating heavy machinery.

''New Moon'' already breaking box office records

 According to early reports, The Twilight Saga: New Moon grossed nearly $28 million at 12:01 a.m.  screenings around the country held this morning. If that number holds, New Moon would edge out the previous two midnight-screening record holders, Harry Potter and the Blood Prince, ($22.2 million) and The Dark Knight ($18.4 million).

Twilight grossed $191.4 million in the U.S. and a near-identical $192.2 million around the rest of the world. I will be interested to see how much New Moon winds up earning, considering the first film was so much better, and sequels rarely make as much as the original hits that spawned them.

Review: ''The Twilight Saga: New Moon''

"You're not the first monsters I've met," the 18-year-old Bella (Kristen Stewart) yawns at a pack of werewolves. They are fairly impressive creatures, these wolf-men who run around shirtless a lot, turn into giant wolves when angry and seem to own matching sets of magical pants that reappear when they transform back into their human selves. The inexplicable pants are a good thing; otherwise, there would be a lot of new moons in New Moon, the second installment in what has now become known as The Twilight Saga.

The first chapter, which was directed by Catherine Hardwicke, told of the tortured, surprisingly engrossing romance between Bella and Edward Cullen (Robert Pattinson), a mysterious, brooding boy at school who turned out to be a 109-year-old vampire.The second, less effective chapter, directed by Chris Weitz (The Golden Compass), has to tear the two lovers apart, because aside from Pam and Jim on The Office, happy couples aren't all that interesting to watch.

After an unfortunate incident during a Cullen birthday gathering (the film's best scene) in which Bella suffers a paper cut and everyone suddenly gets really thirsty, Edward decides the girl will be better off without him and leaves town, promising Bella she'll never see him again. This is quickly proven to be an outright lie, since Edward continues to appear to her in wisps of smoke whenever she's in danger.

 But you can't exactly hold hands with smoke - much less make out with it - and after a few months of heartbroken nightmares and moping, Bella notices her old pal Jacob (Taylor Lautner) is always hanging around and happy to keep her company. He's also filled out considerably since the previous movie (‘‘You know anabolic steroids are really bad for you," she says, reading the viewer's mind). And unlike the intangible Edward, Jacob is really huggable.

What ensues is intended to test Bella's love for Edward - a test that grows increasingly complicated after Jacob discovers he is kindred to the pack of werewolves that roam the woods. But while the romantic triangle may have worked in the pages of Stephenie Meyer's monumental bestseller, it doesn't fly for a second on the screen.

Lautner, who lobbied hard and hit the gym in order to be allowed to continue to play Jacob in New Moon, doesn't have the gravity and depth that Pattinson brings to Edward. He's a boy in a man's body, both as a character and as an actor, and the gifted Stewart, in their scenes together, seems to be tolerating him more than falling for him. There's never any doubt Bella will drop Jacob the moment Edward reappears, which is an insurmountable problem for a film set primarily among the wolf people.

 The vampires eventually return, and the action jets overseas to Italy, but the damage has been done. What came across as intriguing and underplayed in the first film feels silly and clichéd in New Moon, with a tribunal of ancient vampires (led by Michael Sheen) that are as pompous and effete as every tribunal of ancient vampires you've ever seen. Even the appearance of Dakota Fanning as a red-eyed bloodsucker capable of inflicting intolerable pain on others falls flat: When one of the presiding vampires mutters "Let's be done with this," you can't help but agree.

 Inadvertently, New Moon also reminds you what a terrific job Hardwicke did directing the first Twilight, skirting the considerable potential for unintentional humor and bringing the lovers' emotional angst to palpable, relatable life. In the sequel, Weitz lays on a pop song and slow-motion during a critical scene involving the sudden reappearance of a fearsome villain, giving everything an MTV-slick, teen-friendly gloss and reminding you this is just a movie - a somewhat silly and hollow one. At least Weitz nails the setup for the third chapter: The last scene kills and leaves you primed for the next installment in The Twilight Saga, which - let's face it - is all New Moon is really about.

Review: ''Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire''

"Every day I tell myself something's going to happen," the eponymous heroine thinks early on in Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire. "I'm going to break through, or someone is going to break through to me." To say that she eventually gets her wish - sort of - doesn't spoil a thing: This bruising, harrowing movie would be impossible to sit through without at least a hint of light at the end of its astonishingly dark tunnel.

Director Lee Daniels and screenwriter Geoffrey Fletcher don't just want to show you the sad lot of Precious (played by terrific newcomer Gabourey Sibide). They also want to make you feel her day-to-day misery, whether it's the sexual abuse of her father (as the movie opens, she's pregnant with his second child; the first was born with Down Syndrome), the physical and emotional abuse of her monstrous mother (comedian Mo'Nique, in a revelatory performance of evil personified); her low self-esteem (she's obese and, looking in the mirror, imagines a pretty, thin white girl staring back) or her illiteracy, which she keeps from her classmates.

Set in Harlem in 1987 (which seems a century before the area's ethnic assimilation, a time when the idea of an African-American president would have been risible), Precious stacks the deck so high against its protagonist that in almost any other movie, she would come off as a helpless victim. But for all her pain and suffering, Precious is alive and imaginative and resourceful (she fantasizes about being famous and glamorous, and she imagines running off with her math teacher and living happily in the suburbs). The question hanging over the movie is whether the girl will ever get a chance to set free the spirit within her: Pain and hopelessness have a way of dousing even the most innocent ambition.

The plot, which at times feels like a fairy tale with no imaginable happy ending, follows what happens after Precious connects with a teacher (Paula Patton) at an alternative school who understands the formidable hurdles that must be overcome before the girl can even think of things like learning to read, and a social worker (an unrecognizable Mariah Carey) who gradually grasps the severity of her situation.

Daniels, whose previous film, Shadowboxer, sailed so cheerfully over the top that sometimes you couldn't believe what you were seeing, is not timid about putting the audience - and his characters - through the wringer. His direction at times edges into the heavy handed, but the movie is not timid about wanting to induce a reaction. Sequences centering on the girl's time at home alone with her mother induce gasps, because they ring so true, even though you can't imagine a parent who would behave so vilely toward her daughter.

Near the end of the film, Mo'Nique makes the best of a monologue, guaranteed to bring her a Best Supporting Actress nomination, in which her character reveals a glimpse of humanity that, while not redemptive (this character is unredeemable), speaks to the story's central theme. Precious' mother gave up on life long ago, and her seething, voracious anger is a result of her weakness. Despite all the insurmountable obstacles in her way, and despite countless motivations to give up, her daughter refuses to do so. That hope - in the movie, as in life - makes all the difference.

Cormac McCarthy talks about Hollywood and ''The Road''

 Cormac McCarthy doesn't grant many interviews, but the Wall Street Journal's John Jurgensen got him to talk about The Road and the film adaptation last week.

Unlike his appearance on Oprah a couple of years ago, when he seemed uncomfortable and reticent to be there, McCarthy was relaxed and chatty this time, praising The Road director John Hillcoat for capturing the book's spirit, dismissing the widely-held belief that his novel Blood Meridian is unfilmable and revealing a few details about his upcoming book, which will focus on a female protagonist (unusual for McCarthy).

Here are a couple of excerpts from Jurgensen's excellent Q&A:

WSJ: Why don't you sign copies of "The Road"

CM: There are signed copies of the book, but they all belong to my son John, so when he turns 18 he can sell them and go to Las Vegas or whatever. No, those are the only signed copies of the book.

WSJ: How many did you have?

CM: 250. So occasionally I get letters from book dealers or whoever that say, "I have a signed copy of the 'The Road,'" and I say, "No. You don't."

WSJ: What was your relationship like with the Coen brothers on "No Country for Old Men"?

CM: We met and chatted a few times. I enjoyed their company. They're smart and they're very talented. Like John, they didn't need any help from me to make a movie.

WSJ: "All the Pretty Horses" was also turned into a film [starring Matt Damon and Penelope Cruz]. Were you happy with the way it came out?

CM: It could've been better. As it stands today it could be cut and made into a pretty good movie. The director had the notion that he could put the entire book up on the screen. Well, you can't do that. You have to pick out the story that you want to tell and put that on the screen. And so he made this four-hour film and then he found that if he was actually going to get it released, he would have to cut it down to two hours.

JH: Didn't you start "No Country for Old Men" as a screenplay?

CM: Yeah, I wrote it. I showed it to a few people and they didn't seem to be interested. In fact, they said, "That will never work." Years later I got it out and turned it into a novel. Didn't take long. I was at the Academy Awards with the Coens. They had a table full of awards before the evening was over, sitting there like beer cans. One of the first awards that they got was for Best Screenplay, and Ethan came back and he said to me, "Well, I didn't do anything, but I'm keeping it."

Here comes ''Precious''

The first movie Lee Daniels directed, the 2005 drama Shadowboxer about a terminally ill assassin and her unusual relationship with her partner in crime, was largely derided by critics and virtually ignored by audiences, grossing less than $1 million worldwide.

So when Daniels, who had also produced other films about profoundly dysfunctional families (Monster's Ball, The Woodsman), set out to try again, he kept expectations low. Even though his second film, Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire, is adapted from a highly lauded and widely read book, Daniels didn't believe many people would turn out to see it.

``I basically made this movie for my mother and her demographic,'' Daniels says. ``She was always telling me `Why are you making movies about pedophiles and killers? Why can't you make movies like Tyler Perry?' And I said `OK, Mom, I will.' So I was really thinking about an African-American audience when I embarked on this. I really didn't expect it to go anywhere but straight to DVD. I expected my mom and her churchfolk to embrace this marriage of my art into an urban setting. And it really was made primarily for her.''

Shot for a modest $10 million with a first-time actress in the lead, the movie, which opens Friday, tells the story of Precious Jones (Gabourey Sidibe), an overweight, borderline illiterate 16-year-old pregnant with her second child by her father and living with a monstrously abusive mother (Mo'Nique) who belittles and exploits her.

Daniels says he was so awestruck by Sapphire's novel, published in 1996, that he spent eight years trying to convince the author to allow him to turn the book into a movie. But the hard work really began after Daniels secured the film rights.

``The book was not filmable, and it was not easy,'' says screenwriter Geoffrey Fletcher, who shaped the novel's first-person, stream-of-consciousness narrative into a story about Precious' painful and gradual emergence from her state of shellshocked detachment. ``When Lee asked me to adapt it, he told me it would be difficult not only in terms of translating it to film but in terms of the content, the language. It's written in her voice, someone who is barely literate.

Read the rest of my interview with the makers of Precious here.

Stephen King's ''Under the Dome'' headed for HBO

I'm two-thirds of the way through Under the Dome, Stephen King's massive - and excellent - new book, which I'll be reviewing in next Sunday's Herald. The novel, which came out Tuesday, clocks in at a whopping 1,072 pages and is so big that it includes a map and a list of the massive cast of characters (including a "Dogs of Note" section). 

I've been a faithful reader of King ever since I read The Shining at the age of 12, but it had been a long time since I enjoyed one of his novels as much as I am enjoying this one. Don't let the heft of the thing intimidate you, either: The novel moves like lightning and is as compulsively readable as King's old-school classics such as The Stand, Salem's Lot and, yes, The Shining.

Unlike some of his other books that have been forced into flimsy movies and TV mini-series, Under the Dome would be a natural for a film adaptation, although a two-hour running time obviously wouldn't cut it. In a book signing appearance earlier this week, King let it slip out that Under the Dome will actually be turned into an HBO mini-series, which would be the ideal format for an adaptation. Check out the clip below of King's Q&A at Wal-Mart (he mentions the HBO series at around the 2:30 mark).

Review: ''(Untitled)''

(Untitled) is a comedy for anyone who has ever stood before an abstract painting or sculpture or witnessed a performance of interpretive dance and music, and thought "I could have done this myself - only better."

The question of what, exactly, constitutes art is at the center of director Jonathan Parker's satire of the New York gallery scene. The movie simultaneously mocks the vacuousness of the avant-garde and celebrates the spirit with which the artists pursue their sometimes pointless, futile passions.

None takes their craft more seriously than Adrian (Adam Goldberg), the composer of atonal symphonies [comprised of rattling chains, ripping paper and shattering glass. While his brother Josh (Eion Bailey) makes a comfortable living selling bland paintings that hang in hotel lobbies and office waiting rooms, Adrian can barely get anyone to attend his concerts, which one critic describes as bearing "no relation to the way human beings make sense of sound."

(Untitled), which Parker co-wrote with Catherine di Napoli, follows what happens after a Soho gallery owner (Marley Shelton) takes an interest in Adrian's music, which boosts his confidence and offers reassurance that he's not just wasting his time. Adrian is a classically trained musician who believes harmony is "a capitalist plot to sell pianos." He's the prototypical Angry Young Artist, railing at the world through his art.

(Untitled) argues that even though Adrian's music may be unlistenable, his work has a validity that the outrageous installations by a popular, trendy artist (Vinnie Jones) do not, because Adrian's art comes from the heart. That's an obvious observation to build an entire movie around, and although (Untitled) makes a spirited effort to mine comedy from its outre characters and the orbits they inhabit, the picture feels thin and wan, like a joke you've heard 100 times too many.

(Untitled) opens Friday, Nov. 13 at the Regal South Beach.

Isabella Rossellini revisits ''Blue Velvet''

I spoke with Isabella Rossellini about her appearance at the Miami International Book Fair tonight, where she will be discussing her book and collection of short films Green Porno. Inevitably, the conversation turned to Blue Velvet and her indelible performance as the torch singer Dorothy Vallens. I couldn't fit most of what she said into the story that ran in the paper, so I'm posting it here.

"I like to play characters that are written well and thought-out, because it makes your job easier. I doesn't matter if it's a cartoon or a surrealistic film or a profoundly humanistic film. It's when the characters are written with hesitation that they're difficult to play. Television is written with a certain amount of superficiality, just because of the sheer quantity of writing they have to do every week. Sometimes I'll be asked to play a beautiful woman who is aging, That's not a very profound definition of a person. That's not enough for me.

"David [Lynch] wrote a very beautiful script and the characters were very clear, so you can really launch into an imaginative and creative process of acting. When Blue Velvet came out, it was very controversial. People tried to find a reason for not liking it that went beyond the film. They would say "David Lynch is evil!" or "Isabella Rossellini is getting back at her mother!" or "She's doing it to spite Lancome!" But it wasn't any of that.

"Blue Velvet really played with the tension between good and evil. Every time there was something bad, there was also something attractive about it. We don't know why we read the details of murder stories in newspapers with a certain gluttony. It's a strange aspect of human nature. [Dorothy Vallens] was a victim, but she was also a sadomasochist. She was raped, but there were also aspects of her that were very seductive. Everything is always ambivalent, and that's the story of Blue Velvet. This young man [Kyle MacLachlan] is coming of age and believes everything should either be right or wrong, but they're not. That's the core of Blue Velvet, isn't it - this acknowledgement that things are not so simple."

I also asked Rossellini about the scene in which she appears naked in broad daylight on someone's front lawn, a scene that famously led Roger Ebert to condemn the film:

"David explained to me that when he was a little boy, he was coming home from school with his brother and they saw a naked woman walking down the street. Instead of getting curious or titillated or aroused, they got very frightened and burst into tears. That's what he wanted to capture in that scene.

"When he was telling me that story, I was thinking of that famous photograph of the little girl walking down the street in Vietnam after her village had been bombed. She was completely naked and incredibly helpless. I wanted to project that same helplessness, because if I had protected myself in any way, I would have conveyed that this woman still had some sense of prudishness and self-defense at that moment. But she was a woman who had just been raped; she was bruised and dazed and confused. I didn't want the controversy, and nudity is always difficult. But it was what it needed to be. You play the film; you don't play your life."

 

 

Review: ''2012''

The first time the sun destroyed the Earth in a Hollywood movie this year came at the end of Knowing, when our planet went up in smoke in a matter of minutes. The sun is at it again in 2012, although we are not going down so quickly this time.

There are times when 2012 feels as if it is not going to end until 2012 - or at least until director Roland Emmerich, (Independence Day, Godzilla, The Day After Tomorrow), who has an insatiable appetite for destruction and blowing up historical monuments, has come up with yet another new way of obliterating the White House. (‘‘I've got it! Let's have the USS John F. Kennedy aircraft carrier plow into it! Trust me, guys, this'll work!'').

2012 is a movie designed to make Irwin Allen seem like a girly-man - a movie designed to make every other disaster picture ever made seem as if it had been shot on cardboard sets on a budget of $10. This is Earthquake, The Poseidon Adventure, Volcano and all those Airport movies rolled into one insane, eye-popping spectacle, and the film certainly delivers everything it promises. You have never seen special effects like these.

You have also never seen so many movie characters running around shouting "That's impossible!'' "My . . . God!'' "What is happening?" and "Are you absolutely sure about this?" - which is probably exactly what people would be saying if the Earth's core began melting, the ground started caving in, placid lakes suddenly sprouted giant volcanoes and Bill O'Reilly went Democrat.

And to their credit, Emmerich and co-writer Harald Kloser (no doubt the cinema's first film-composer-turned-screenwriter) have made some 2012 protagonists much more engaging than the characters who normally populate this kind of fare. There is Jackson (John Cusack), a failed writer and failed husband trying to maintain a bond with ex-wife Kate (Amanda Peet) and their two young children. Tom McCarthy, the accomplished director of The Station Agent and The Visitor, does more than most actors would with the role of Kate's new boyfriend,who happens to have taken a few flying lessons in his spare time (never has a hobby become handier).

The boomy-voiced Zlatko Buric is terrific as a Russian billionaire who, like many of the world's wealthiest people, knew about the impending apocalypse and has made expensive preparations to survive. And Chiwetel Ejiofor, as the government scientist who first warns the President (Danny Glover) about what's about to go down, brings an air of dignity and class the movie really does not deserve.

But enough about all this boring acting nonsense. 2012 ain't Shakespeare, and Emmerich is only interested in people in terms of how they look falling from buildings or being squashed by toppling statues. There are seven or eight big setpieces, but none beats the destruction of Los Angeles by a 10.5 earthquake, with Jackson barrelling down the streets in a limo with his family, the city raining down on their heads.

The sequence is stunning - you can't wait for the DVD, so you can break it down frame-by-frame - and there are several other scenes almost as good in which characters stare in horrified awe at a giant wall of lava, a tidal wave or Oliver Platt's overacting as the president's chief of staff, one of those characters who, like many newspaper editors, are always inexplicably angry and short-tempered for no apparent reason.

2012, which runs almost three hours, would have been better (and a lot shorter) if Emmerich hadn't come up with a creaky third act in which he figures out a way to ensure that mankind won't be completely wiped out. The last 40 minutes test your patience - and intelligence - in a way the rest of this big, dumb, crazy movie never does: The film starts taking itself too seriously. I liked 2012 better when people were running around shouting "The Mayans saw this coming!'' which, come to think of it, also happened in Knowing. Who says there are no original ideas left in Hollywood?

2012 opens in South Florida on Friday, Nov. 13.