Concerned about Global Warming?
Friday, August 15, 2008 at 17:08 As most of you already know, I've been working on a Web series concept around the theme of global warming and climate change. My partner and I have now found a producer who's interested in developing the project further.
I've created a survey that will help us hone our pitch. If you're concerned about global warming and climate change, please take a moment to fill it out. You'll be helping me out and you'll have a hand in shaping programming about an important issue. The survey is only 10 questions long, and you don't have to give us your email address if you don't want to.Click Here to take survey Please feel free to forward the link to your friends. Thanks...and wish us luck!The Dark Knight
Saturday, August 2, 2008 at 19:05 Reviewed by Coach Patton Back to Reviews
©D. Patton, All Rights Reserved
Directed by: Christopher Nolan
Screenplay by: Jonathan Nolan and Christopher Nolan
From a story by: Christopher Nolan & David S. Goyer
Based on characters created by: Bob Kane
Running Length: 2:30 Rated: PG-13 (Violence)
Cast: Christian Bale, Heath Ledger, Michael Caine, Aaron Eckhart, Gary Oldman, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Morgan Freeman, Eric Roberts
PLOT: With the help of Lieutenant Jim Gordon and District Attorney Harvey Dent, Batman sets out to destroy organized crime in Gotham for good. The triumvirate proves to be effective, but they soon find themselves prey to a rising criminal mastermind known as the Joker, who thrusts Gotham into anarchy and forces the Dark Knight ever closer to crossing the fine line between hero and vigilante.
Why So Serious?
The Dark Knight all but annihilates the premises of Batman Begins. In addition to the avarice of Gotham, Batman finds himself in battle with a remorseless psychotic, the Joker (Heath Ledger).
Batman (Christian Bale) is powerless against such a villain. Faced with opportunities to kill the Joker, Batman refuses to sacrifice his moral code -- something the Joker exploits. Each time the Batman restrains himself, the Joker manipulates him into making choices that result in greater catastrophes.
That, in the final analysis, is what the Joker is really interested in: to deprive Gotham of its hero, its hope, and its soul. The Joker explains to Batman that he must "work, though, sort of the dark side, if you will. You've got to spend time in the shadows.”
It’s nightmare material. The Dark Knight is above all an emotionally and physically draining roller coaster ride and morality play. But the real meat is in the complicated narrative and character interaction, especially between Batman and The Joker.
Batman himself ends up getting the short shrift, and it’s a bitter irony that we’ve now returned to a Batman film series where Batman must fight for screen time against his supporting cast.
The Joker is, as he himself puts it, "an agent of chaos." He exists. He wreaks havoc on the cosmos. He arrives in Gotham abruptly, as if he’d stepped through a door leading to the Twilight Zone. And that's all we need to know. Played to the hilt as pure Id and sociopathic glee, he is simply walking death.
It is immediately clear that the Joker is playing a far different game than the Batman ever imagined. He quickly seizes control of the city’s crime syndicate and Batman’s attention with no rhyme or reason. The Joker's true motives are unexplained, unlike those of all previous comic-book villains.
"Some men," says Batman's butler Alfred (Michael Caine), the moral center of Bruce Wayne's universe, "just want to see the world burn."
The Joker kills one-time allies for pleasure, and enjoys a sexual frisson from shattering other people's lives. He is of course, a demonic creation and three-ring circus of one wholly inhabited by Heath Ledger. It is impossible to watch Ledger’s performance without feeling a sense of poignancy.
The strength of his Joker is its complexity and dark humanity: the way Ledger wears the character’s pain is crystal clear beneath the grotesque and obscure clown’s make up, the painted smile, the lank, greasy hair, the flitting eyes and the ever-darting tongue.
To answer the next question, Heath Ledger is terrifically fun with a definitive and he burns this incarnation of The Joker into our psyche as securely as did Jack Nicholson's. Ledger inhabits the Joker the way he inhabited the body of that sad, gay cowboy in Brokeback Mountain : purely, inevitably, as though he was destined to spread paint on his face and lick his mouth with delight.
Ledger's Joker is a fearsome character whose deadly game is profoundly grounded in a perverse sort of pragmatic reality, built on an unredeemable negative view of human weakness. When Ledger wields a knife, he is thoroughly terrifying (do not, despite the PG-13 rating, take the children). He goes beyond the “Hannibal Lecter” model of criminal insanity, (with its refined serial killing and superficial gloss of malefaction), to humankind's most primeval and epic definition of evil — as anarchy that infects the order of things. "Wanna know how I got these scars?" he says brightly, but the back story doesn't matter. He tells his victims a story of the long-ago maltreatment he suffered, but offers many permutations. Sometimes he says his father cut his face into a gruesome smile, other times he says he did it himself -- as if to underscore the foolishness of looking to the Joker as a reliable narrator.
But there is desperation beneath the Joker's cruelty, and Ledger shows it to us in his hunched-up walk, and in the slurry precision of his speech. But his Joker is a creature of such ghastly life, and the performance is so visceral, creepy and insistently present that the characterization pulls you in almost at once.
The finest moments in The Dark Knight belong to Ledger as the Joker. His performance is a heroic, unsettling and difficult to watch, partly because it's impossible to remove it from the context of Ledger's death. This young actor looked into the abyss. As you’re watching him, you can’t help wondering how badly he may have messed himself up in order to play the role this way.
Ledger passed on in January at age 28 from an inadvertent overdose, after primary photography was completed. His death might have cast a paralyzing, dark covering over the film if Ledger’s performance were not so alive.
Ledger’s tongue darting in and out of his mouth like a jittery animal, chewing and licking his sloppy, red-smeared lips, he turns the Joker into a tormentor who giggles manically while he hah-hah-hah heh-heh-heh’s through life --just wanting to see the world burn. He isn’t fighting for anything or anyone. He isn’t a terrorist, just terrifying. Or at least that’s How It Seemed from Where I Sat.
What’s it worth?When Oscar recommendations come out next January, Heath Ledger will have been dead for a year. Given all of the Oscar hubbub he’s engendering now, I’m sure he’ll be on that list of contenders, but can he really win?
For film buffs -- the price of the evening shows
For the average viewer -- matinee price at your local cinema.
I urge you to see this movie and then email me about it; I want to discuss it further.
However, there has only been one posthumous Oscar -- to Peter Finch for Network but he died only a few weeks before the final Oscar votes were made. We know the whole world is different today -- even Hollywood -- than it was when that other posthumous Oscar was awarded. If so, then maybe this joker can get the last laugh.
Roll credits:
Cinematography: Wally Pfister
Music: Hans Zimmer, James Newton-Howard
CAST
Christian Bale --- Bruce Wayne / Batman
Heath Ledger --- The Joker
Aaron Eckhart --- Harvey Dent / Two-Face
Michael Caine --- Alfred Pennyworth
Maggie Gyllenhaal --- Rachel Dawes
Gary Oldman --- Lt. James Gordon
Morgan Freeman --- Lucius Fox
Monique Curnen --- Det. Ramirez
Ron Dean --- Detective Wuertz
Cillian Murphy --- The Scarecrow
Chin Han --- Lau
Nestor Carbonell --- Mayor
Eric Roberts --- Salvatore Maroni
Ritchie Coster --- The Chechen
Anthony Michael Hall --- Mike Engel
Keith Szarabajka --- Detective Stephens
Colin McFarlane --- Commissioner Gillian B. Loeb
William Fichtner --- Courageous Bank Manager
FADE TO BLACK
In The Name Of Truth, Justice and In the Service of A Higher Good, I Remain Your Friend, Movie Reviewer and Spiritual Advisor, Coach Patton
Workshop with Yves Lavandier (Paris)
Saturday, July 26, 2008 at 16:29 Here's another Parisian resource for you.
Yves Lavandier (writer/director, script consultant, and author of the book Writing Drama) will lead two screenwriting workshops in Paris. Thirty weekly sessions of 4 hours each. Workshop will focus on practice rather than theory, and participants will emerge with a completed script. Runs October 2008 - June 2009. One of the workshops will be in English.
For more info, write to Yves Lavandier. Hurry, limited places available.
Michael Clayton (2007)
Thursday, July 24, 2008 at 17:00 Back to Reviews
Reviewed by Coach Patton
©D. Patton, All Rights Reserved
Written and Directed by Tony Gilroy
Running Length: 2:00 Rated: R (Profanity)
PLOT: Michael Clayton is an in-house "fixer" at one of the largest corporate law firms in New York. A former criminal prosecutor, Clayton takes care of Kenner, Bach & Ledeen's dirtiest work at the behest of the firm's co-founder Marty Bach. Though burned out and hardly content with his job as a fixer, his divorce, a failed business venture and mounting debt have left Clayton inextricably tied to the firm. At U/North, meanwhile, the career of litigator Karen Crowder rests on the multi-million dollar settlement of a class action suit that Clayton's firm is leading to a seemingly successful conclusion. But when Kenner Bach's brilliant and guilt-ridden attorney Arthur Edens sabotages the U/North case, Clayton faces the biggest challenge of his career and his life.
Starring: George Clooney, Tom Wilkinson, Tilda Swinton, Sydney Pollack, Michael O'Keefe, Ken Howard
The Truth Can Be Adjusted
There really was a time when American cinema contained complex storylines, social commentary and characters that were allowed to be flawed and ambiguous instead of being purely good or purely evil. During this period (historians have referred to it as “the Seventies”) not only did these films -- including such titles as The Parallax View, Serpico, Dog Day Afternoon and All the President’s Men, to name a few -- exist, they were designed as mainstream entertainments to be enjoyed not by the critics and the public alike.
Somewhere along the line, however, this vogue for intelligently crafted and socially committed popular entertainment fell by the wayside for a number of reasons--some historians tend to offer the knee-jerk explanation Star Wars in the same way that high school teachers reduce the myriad details leading up to the Civil War as “slavery.” Such films became the exception rather than the rule and on the rare occasions when one would actually slip through the filmmaking apparatus, it would only be because the studio in charge figured that such a film might score the Oscar nominations that their blockbuster gumdrops were never going to receive
One movie star who has chosen to use his considerable box-office clout to keep this cinematic tradition alive against the odds over the years is George Clooney. Whether he has been doing this out of a deep love for the films of that bygone era or as a form of continued penance for appearing in one of the crappiest corporate-driven films ever made, the disastrous Batman & Robin, I cannot say. But whatever the reason, the end result has been one of the most fascinating filmographies in recent years.
As an actor, producer or director, he could easily be making a career out of doing shallow entertainments for enormous paydays but instead, he has used his considerable clout to instead put forth such challenging and hardly sure-fire films as Three Kings, O Brother, Where Art Thou?, Fail-Safe, Solaris, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, Good Night, and Good Luck, Syriana and The Good German. Although not all of these films were successful from a box-office standpoint (which explains his occasional appearances in such smartly conceived blockbusters as the Ocean’s Eleven films), they were all smart and thoughtful films that were among the best of their respective years and if they had been made during the 1970's, it is likely that film connoisseurs would be venerating them today as much as they have done with other classics of the era.
His latest film, Michael Clayton, continues this streak by giving viewers a taut, exciting and thoughtful legal thriller that is so smartly conceived and executed that to call it a “legal thriller” almost sounds demeaning.
When it comes to motion pictures, there are essentially two kinds of thrillers: cerebral thrillers, which burn more slowly but are often more satisfying in the end and visceral thrillers, which rely on action to generate tension and excitement. Michael Clayton, (the directorial debut of screenwriter Tony Gilroy), belongs in the first category. The movie unfolds at its own pace and makes few concessions to impatient viewers or those who don't pay attention. The narrative is dense and presented in a manner that may cause initial confusion (a wrap-around framing device, with about 90% of the movie in back-flashes, is used).
Michael Clayton (George Clooney) is a "fixer" at a huge law firm. The firm has employed him to keep the dirty laundry clean by bending the truth and covering up scandals. Arthur Edens (Tom Wilkinson) is a well known lawyer at the same firm who is defending the agricultural giant "U-North" in a multi-million dollar lawsuit. During a deposition Wilkinson decides to strip off his clothing and run around the parking lot. Fearing that "U-North" might drop the firm from representing them, they send Michael Clayton to smooth things over and assure them that Wilkinson is fine. In the process Clayton uncovers some startling truths about "U-North" and the lawsuit. Truths that shake Clayton down to his foundation and make him question everything that he knows.
George Clooney is hands down one of the best actors of his generation, in spite of being one of the handsomest as well. I can't think of a film I haven't enjoyed him in. He has an old-time actor feel to him that you just don't see anymore. He makes me remember back to actors like Cary Grant and James Stewart. They were able to play the serious roles and the funny roles, but always came across as powerful. Clooney has proven to be the same. He can play a comedy role in O’ Brother Where Art Thou? and then equally play a serious role in a film like Syriana. If it has Clooney in it, you bet I will be seeing it. I also have to mention Tom Wilkinson who almost stole the show. Ever since his Oscar-nominated performance in In The Bedroom he has made me a fan. You don't want to miss him in this.
Along with great performances there is great directing. This is director Tony Gilroy's first film, which he also wrote. Other films for which he either wrote the story or screenplay are: all three Bourne films, Proof of Life, Armageddon, for which he can be forgive because he also wrote The Devil's Advocate.
For a first-time director, this is the kind of film you want to make. Every scene had purpose and was executed and photographed wonderfully (stunning cinematography by Robert Elswit). The progression and development of each character was thought out and also executed to perfection. However, even though it had great directing, and the acting was outstanding, this film isn't for everyone.
Why isn't this film for everyone? Because it's slow paced and has a complex, detailed storyline that demands your close attention. This isn't your summer blockbuster type of film. This isn't the film to see if you just want some eye candy. However, it is enthralling to the point that you become totally immersed in the story. This is the kind of film, just like Syriana or The Valley of Elah, which you watch if you want to see filmmaking and story writing at its finest. This is the type of film where you watch the character change before your eyes and it makes you want to change as well. It is a thought-provoking film instead of a film where you can just shut off your mind and take a break from reality. I always find this kind of movie more memorable and rewarding. If you take the time to see Michael Clayton, I hope you find it as rewarding as I did.
Obviously, Michael Clayton is a film that serves as an indictment of the heartlessness of contemporary corporate culture and the potential futility of standing up to such a seemingly invincible opponent (which is ironic when you consider that its distributor, Warner Brothers, is part of a multi-national corporate structure itself) and while there is no doubt about the direction of its social and political leanings, it doesn’t merely spend two solid hours of hitting you over the head with them. Instead, it wraps them within the context of an undeniably gripping drama that will keep you on the edge of your seat while watching it and continue percolating in your mind for days after you’ve seen it.
For Gilroy, it marks a remarkable directorial debut and a signal of promising things to come. For Clooney, it is yet another personal and professional triumph that further solidifies his position as one of the most fascinating leading men working in films today. For intelligent moviegoers who have despaired of seeing any adult-oriented dramas that don’t hit you over the head with their obvious story points (what I like to call the “Paul Haggis Factor” [see In the Valley of Elah]), it is a welcome reminder of a filmmaking style that used to be the norm instead of the exception. Or at least that’s How It Seemed from Where I Sat.
What’s it worth?
For film buffs -- the price of the evening shows (twice)
For the average viewer --- matinee price at your local cinema.
Roll credits
Michael Clayton
Writer & Director: Tony Gilroy
Original Music: James Newton Howard
Cinematographer: Robert Elswit
CAST
George Clooney ---- Michael Clayton
Tom Wilkinson ---- Arthur Edens
Sydney Pollack ---- Marty Bach
Tilda Swinton ---- Karen Crowder
Michael O'Keefe ---- Barry Grissom
Denis O'Hare ---- Mr. Greer
Julie White ---- Mrs. Greer
Austin Williams ---- Henry Clayton
Merritt Wever ---- Anna
Ken Howard ---- Don Jefferies
Robert Prescott ---- Mr. Verne
Terry Serpico ---- Mr. Iker
David Zayas ---- Detective Dalberto
Bill Raymond ---- Gabe Zabel
Kevin Hagan ---- Raymond Clayton
Julia Gibson ---- Stephanie Clayton
Sean Cullen ---- Gene Clayton
David Lansbury ---- Timmy Clayton
Fade to black
In The Name Of Truth, Justice and In the Service of A Higher Good, I Remain Your Friend, Movie Reviewer and Spiritual Advisor, Coach Patton
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Professional Development Workshop (Paris)
Wednesday, July 23, 2008 at 15:44 My friend Judith Merians is giving another one of her fabulous workshops in September. Details below!
FILM PRODUCING WORKSHOP
Get the inside information that can make you more successful as a writer, director, producer, or hyphenate filmmaker. Do you want to produce the script you wrote or the literary property you optioned, start a production company so you can develop projects, or talk to producers intelligently? In the Film Producing Workshop you will learn what it means to be a producer, what skills you need, who you do business with, how you analyze the marketplace and the buyers, how to talk to money, distributors, and producers and think like they do. Whatever your role in making films there is much to be learned that will influence the script you write, the producers you work with, the companies you target, the projects you select, and the deals you make.
Led by Judith Merians, who has been an entertainment lawyer and studio executive, literary agent, and film school professor in Los Angeles for over 25 years. In her years in Hollywood, Judith has been involved in hundreds of films and has sat on all sides of the table - development, production, financing, completion bonds, distribution, and marketing.
SATURDAY SEPTEMBER 13, 2008, 3-6PM
Join us for this 3-hour workshop session sponsored by Adrian Leeds and Parler Paris Upstairs at La Pierre du Marais, 96, rue des Archives (at the corner of rue de Bretagne), 75003 Paris. Métro: Temple, République, or Arts et Métiers
Only 30€ per person!