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Newest Yorker

Timely movie-resonant quotation, attributed in the February 17-24 New Yorker by Nicholas Lemann to Douglas Feith, Under-Secretary of Defense for Policy, who was quoted in an article last week about movie critics. This time round, he says that explaining what might happen in Iraq if we prosecute a war there might be difficult. “I think it was Samuel Goldwyn who once said never make forecasts, especially about the future.” So much for that pesky Oscar...

In Praise of the Congo Arthouse

While researching an article about small-city arthouses, I happened upon an outfit called The Memphis Digital Arts Cooperative’s First Congo Arthouse Theater at First Congregational Church. The Memphis Commercial Appeal critic, John Beifuss, was reviewing last Friday’s opening of Jean-Luc Godard's In Praise of Love, in which he prefaces a well-reasoned three-and-a-half star review with the sort of caution that even Peter Bart could appreciate: “In the almost seven years I’ve been in the arts-and-entertainment department of this newspaper, I’ve written close to 1,026 movie reviews... I cite that (personally alarming) statistic simple to lend some context and credence to the following assertion: In Praise of Love, the latest film from cinema revolutionary Godard is the most challenging, intimidating and anti-commercial work to be booked into a Memphis theater since at least 1996.” I wonder what 1996 movie might have been more anti-commercial if he’d been reviewing then...

Peace trend

If there’s a downturn in moviegoing this weekend, will any trendspotters attribute it to the dozens of peace marches scheduled in Manhattan near the United Nations and across the country on Saturday?

Devil may care

Or will Daredevil have to battle other demons?

At the Pasadena screening where a saw Daredevil last week, a few seconds after Colin Farrell’s second big fight scene as comic-book nemesis Bullseye, a wiry, average-sized figure shuffled out with a couple of pals.

A few seconds passed and a waft of cigarette smoke drifted through the screening room. A few more and the figure settled back in: Farrell couldn’t quite handle himself without a quick hit of nicotine. His assassin with the perfect aim is the wildest card in Daredevil, writer-director Mark Steven Johnson’s sometimes likable but seldom memorable adaptation of the Marvel comic about Matt Murdock (Ben Affleck), a blind lawyer and Manhattan superhero-by-night. Affleck’s best behind his black leather devil mask, and his best scene comes when he meets the love of his life, Elektra Natchios (Jennifer Garner), who can smile and twinkle with the best of them when not kicking butt on her own. (Their true meet-cute, a Hong Kong-style wire-work martial-arts battle in a schoolyard, is the movie’s best scene, and just a touch hot.) Despite the passion of followers of the comic, Daredevil has been positioned by the Marvel clan and Fox as a lesser-known title that won’t hit Spider-Man heights; in fact, the overall impression of the entertaining jumble is one of a second-tier title without deeper resonance. Adequate, goofy, but it ain’t going to change your life.

Farrell, who’s gained a reputation as a ladies’ man and an intense young up-and-comer, is as intense first thing in the morning as on screen. He says he never read comics. “There’s not much of a comic book culture where I come from,” he says in his elegant, rapid-fire Irish brogue. “It was all new to me, this kind of mythological folklore that’s contained in comic books, whether it’s DC or Marvel. I’d never read about them. I met Mark Steven Johnson and his passion was so apparent and so contagious that I wanted to be part of it, y’know, as much because of him if not more than anything else in the project.”

He’s always intense, but he’s way over-the-top in Daredevil. “Oh! Ridiculously over the top! Yeh. I always concern myself with that actor-y bullshit of character, regardless of what people say. They talked of Tigerland as an action film, Minority Report as an action film, I just concern myself with the character and what goes on in his head and heart. But this time there was no internal struggle going on. It wasn’t someone who lost their father or found themselves in a prisoner-of-war camp, or going through anything really just the fun and enjoyment and pleasure that he derived from killing people! He was fairly black-and-white, Bullseye, without the shades of gray I’ve played before. It was just a case of checking your subtlety at the door and having a fookin’ good time, y’know? Mark was great to be around, he was always pushing me to go further.” A puff. “I enjoyed it.”

And the most fun? “The costumes. You put that shit on, you put the bullseye on, you’re bald, you got piercings, you start moving a little bit differently and swaggering like your shit doesn’t stink. And then what was hard was the same thing. You growl a lot and you feel like you’re just ridiculous and just a caricature and over the top so you deal with that.”

Supposedly there was a scene where Farrell and Garner go at it and he almost bit off her lip. “Yeah, yeah,” he says with his puppy-dog-that-ate-the-shark smile. “She spilled the beans on me, did she?” A bigger grin: “Bitch!” You were actually gnawing on her face? “When in Rome, I mean, what are you going to do? I didn’t get a chance to kiss her, so when I was [trying to kill] her, I thought I’d just nibble on her lip, give her a sweet hereafter kiss.” He mimics a smooch. “I may have gone over the top with that, but it was tough with her because she’s such a tough chick, she’s so fit, she’s so well able to fookin’ fight and do all the stunts and the wire work herself that maybe I forgot for a second that she was a girl.”

But Farrell is less fit, and a chain-smoker. “I was fooked!” he says. “we’d do two takes of the fight and I’d be in the corner--” he wheezes-- “She’d be going, can we go again straightaway please, I’d go, ‘The fookin’ bitch is gonna kill me, she’s gonna kill me because she’s so damn fit and strong. I thought she was fantastic in the film.”

What about the line, “I want a bleeding costume!” “That was in the script, and I say in the film if you look at my lips, ‘I want a fookin’ costume!’ Then they looped it.”

But he swears his life is not going to be all Hollywood movies. “You do gigs like S.W.A.T. all the time, it’ll fuckin’ kill ya. Don’t get me wrong, life is not hard for Colin Farrell, but it’d kill me soul. For good, bad, or indifferent, the work, I don’t know what it is, because I can never judge my work and I’m fairly unhappy with it most of the time to be honest with yah, but I’ve tried to do different characters. I’m lucky enough to have been in big pictures, but I try to play guys from different backgrounds in different stages of their lives.”

“The fact I got the chance to do all this shit still surprises me,” he muses. What about the attention to how frankly you speak of your personal life? “Surprise me? Jeez, I live in the fookin’ real world. You’re going to be in films or on stage singing a song, play baseball for the Knicks, people are going to start watching what you drink, what you... ahhh, basketball for the Knicks, baseball for fuckin’ whoever... I’m Irish, obviously, very Irish. God! I fucked that up! I’ve been here three years and I don’t know jackshit!” He grins.

“I’m a 26-year-old young fellow who’s in movies, of course I’m going to find it easier than some other 26-year-old young fellows to get laid, y’know? Of course? Yeah? It states the obviously. It’s not necessarily my charm or my game but it’s a city built on movies. But lady-killer? I’m just a 26-year-old guy who’s single and having a good time.”

Remote Possibilities

While the features of Russian visionary Andrei Tarkovsky continue a retrospective tour of the U.S. under the umbrella, “The Inner Landscapes of Andrei Tarkovsky”, two of his earliest works are out on DVD. Facets Video distributes Tarkovsky’s 1960 The Steamroller and the Violin, a forty-three-minute diploma film from the 28-year-old director. A portrait of an old friendship between a young boy who plays the violin and a macho steamroller operator, it’s most memorable for the performance by the young boy, Igor Fomchenko. A more peculiar Tarkovsky entry is Criterion’s three-feature double-disc Ernest Hemingway’s The Killers, which includes Robert Siodmak’s grand 1946 Burt Lancaster-starring noir, Don Siegel’s violent low-budget 1964 adaptation, with Lee Marvin, Clu Gallagher, John Cassavetes, and Ronald Reagan, in his last screen acting role, who just can’t help pistol-whipping Angie Dickinson. Among over a dozen other extras, Criterion has included Tarkovsky’s 1956 student film version of The Killers; another director is credited with a third of the fifteen-minute short. It’s more than a footnote.

And an exciting Criterion footnote: one of their spring projects I just heard about is a five-DVD box set that contains the complete saga of Francois Truffaut's movies that star Jean-Pierre Léaud as his alter ego, Antoine Doinel. The movies include The 400 Blows, Bed and Board, and Love on the Run. No word yet on extras. The movies are notable for their unique look at a character’s progress from juvenile delinquency to twentysomething irresponsibility and Leaud, who the audience gets to observe as if in home movies.

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