“Miramax is brilliant at publicizing its successes, but it’s even more brilliant at burying its failures,” said Dennis Rice, their former president of marketing. Miramax Films was notorious for test screening its movies – often in malls in New Jersey – and barely releasing the ones that scored poorly. Some went straight to video, even those with major stars. Here’s a look at some of the studio’s B-sides, bombs and greatest misses.

Synopsis
Glam rock icon Maxwell Demon, alias Brian Slade (Jonathan Rhys Meyers) takes the stage in England, where an assassin shoots him. The incident is revealed to be a hoax, and Slade’s career implodes. The rocker then disappears. In 1984, on the ten year anniversary of the stunt, journalist Arthur Stuart (Christian Bale) is sent to find out what happened to Slade.

Much of Arthur’s information on the charismatic, bisexual rock star comes from his soused, American ex-wife Mandy (Toni Collette), who recounts her ex-husband’s rise from musical anonymity at the Sombero Club in Kensington, his obsession with a trash rocker named Curt Wild (Ewan McGregor) and his makeover into a star under the guide of manager Jerry Devine (Eddie Izzard).

As Slade’s story unfolds, we also follow a teenage Arthur as he discovers the freedom of expression in glam rock, troubling his parents with his bizarre new tastes. Slade fails to rejuvenate Curt Wild’s career, prompting Slade to commit career suicide and vanish. Searching for him ten years later, Arthur discovers similarities between Slade and a soulless pop icon named Tommy Stone.

Production history 
As early as 1990, writer-director Todd Haynes was interested in making a movie about the rise and aftermath of glam rock, the theatrical, sexually amorphous genre personified by David Bowie, which peaked in England in 1973. Haynes felt the visual dash of the era’s performers would be perfect for a film, and wrote a script from a story developed with editor James Lyons. With producer Christine Vachon, Haynes approached Bowie for the rights to his music. After some consideration, the rocker turned them down.

With financing from CiBy 2000 and Channel 4 in England, a budget of $9 million was set. Before filming began, $1 million of that evaporated. Harvey Weinstein then became interested in the film’s North American rights. He met with the filmmakers, mentioning The Crying Game and how Miramax was a gay friendly studio. Impressed with his pitch – and needing money – Vachon agreed to let Miramax distribute the film in the U.S.

Weinstein was underwhelmed when shown a rough cut. He insisted they test screen the film. When the results came back, Miramax suggested about 13 minutes be cut. Haynes ultimately ignored most of the suggestions, trimming only three or four minutes. Weinstein responded by burying the movie. Velvet Goldmine received a limited release in the U.S., disappearing amid lukewarm reviews and barely $1 million at the box office.

Opinion
Within the opening ten minutes of Velvet Goldmine, we’re treated to a UFO, Oscar Wilde, glam rock fans in the UK, and a phony assassination. So, this is as far from Selena as you can get. Haynes rejected a facts based approach to the life of David Bowie. His tools as a filmmaker include a vivid imagination, visual panache, and an elaborate narrative inspired by Citizen Kane.

Terrific casting – and one of the best rock soundtracks of all time – augment the brilliance of this movie. Christian Bale, Toni Collette and Ewan McGregor are great in this. I can’t think of many actors who could pull off what they did here (McGregor and Rhys Meyers supplied their own vocals). The soundtrack includes songs written by Brian Eno, Iggy Pop and Bryan Ferry and I can’t recall one of the tracks that wasn’t awesome. And I’m not even a fan of glam rock.

Haynes alternates between fact and innuendo, the ’70s and ’80s, reality and fantasy. There’s not a single miscue here. So many rock films go off the rails by dramatizing incidents, only to end up trivializing the musicians. Instead of obsessing over what Bowie did, or who he did, Velvet Goldmine conjures a trippy, dreamlike feel that engages the imagination. The film suggests that this is exactly what made glam rock unique in the first place.

“Goldmine’s success is in its evocation of the period – glam-struck London of the early 1970s – and its poignancy depicting the alienation of an insecure rock fan as he tries to be as Out There as the In Crowd,” writes Jon Dunmore at Poffy the Cucumber’s Movie Mania.

Patrick at Thoughts on Stuff says, “I could see why people would dislike this movie, admittedly it is more style than what would usually be considered substance, but in this case, the substance is the style.”

“Velvet Goldmine is extravagant, outlandish and bizarre. But … this is precisely what the filmmakers were aiming for,” writes Diane Selkirk at Apollo Movie Guide.

© Joe Valdez

“Miramax is brilliant at publicizing its successes, but it’s even more brilliant at burying its failures,” said Dennis Rice, their former president of marketing. Miramax Films was notorious for test screening its movies – often in malls in New Jersey – and barely releasing the ones that scored poorly. Some went straight to video, even those with major stars. Here’s a look at some of the studio’s B-sides, bombs and greatest misses.

Synopsis
In New York City of the year 2000, Hamlet (Ethan Hawke) returns from college following the death of his father, king and CEO of the Denmark Corporation. His mother Gertrude (Diane Venora) has hastily married the king’s brother, Claudius (Kyle MacLachlan) and Hamlet – who sulks around in a Peruvian cap and tapes himself on digital video – suspects foul play.

Living with his family in the Elsinore Hotel, Hamlet is notified by a security guard that his father was spotted in an elevator. Hamlet confronts the Ghost (Sam Shepard) and is informed that the King was poisoned by Claudius. Ophelia (Julia Stiles) makes overtures to see Hamlet, but is advised by her brother Laertes (Liev Schreiber) that Hamlet will one day be king, and she cannot get involved.

Polonius (Bill Murray), advisor to the new king, informs him that Hamlet has been acting strangely. Claudius employs two of Hamlet’s friends from school, Rosencrantz (Steve Zahn) and Guildenstern (Dechen Thurman) to gain Hamlet’s trust to find out what he knows.

Hamlet makes an avant garde video titled The Mousetrap and with the help of his friend Horatio, plans to screen it for his family, to “catch the conscience of the king.” When Claudius reacts visibly to a display of poison and murder, Hamlet knows the ghost speaks the truth, and plans his revenge.

Directed by Michael Almereyda, who adapted the script from William Shakespeare’s play, Hamlet was produced for less than $2 million. According to Hawke, everyone worked for free in order to retain creative control. Despite being released in May, the film performed well in New York and L.A., but failed to draw crowds when it expanded to 64 screens nationwide. Without support from its distributor – Miramax – it quietly disappeared.

Opinion
There’s uniformly strong work among almost everyone in the cast, but what kills this experiment is its extremely low budget, and Ethan Hawke in the title role. Almereyda never demonstrates any aptitude to make Hamlet relevant in a modern setting. Hawke has yet to give a performance where I haven’t thought, “There’s a guy giving a performance,” and doesn’t possess much dexterity for Shakespeare.

“Measure for measure, I liked this Hamlet more than the Mel Gibson version, less than the Kenneth Branagh version, and about the same as the famous 1948 Laurence Olivier version,” writes Jeffrey Anderson at Combustible Celluloid.

Dan Jardine at Apollo Movie Guide says, “Visually and kinetically, the film is a washed out and dispassionate variation on Baz Luhrman’s intriguing … Romeo+Juliet. Despite the New York setting, Almereyda fails to take advantage of the wealth of visual resources at his disposal.”

“The major Hamlets are Olivier, [Richard] Burton, [Derek] Jacobi, [Kevin] Kline, and Branagh,” writes Alan Vanneman at Bright Lights Film Journal. He calls the Hawke version, “a serious, and seriously unsuccessful, attempt to re-imagine the play.”

© Joe Valdez

“Miramax is brilliant at publicizing its successes, but it’s even more brilliant at burying its failures,” said Dennis Rice, their former president of marketing. Miramax Films was notorious for test screening its movies – often in malls in New Jersey – and barely releasing the ones that scored poorly. Some went straight to video, even those with major stars. Here’s a look at some of the studio’s B-sides, bombs and greatest misses.

Synopsis
Leo Handler (Mark Wahlberg) returns to Queens after serving a sixteen month prison sentence for auto theft. Guests at his welcome home party include his buddy Willie (Joaquin Phoenix), his ailing mother (Ellen Burstyn), his aunt (Faye Dunaway) and his cousin Erica (Charlize Theron), who has become Willi’es girlfriend, in spite of a history she once had with Leo.

Leo visits his uncle Frank (James Caan), owner of a manufacturing company that supplies the New York subway. Leo is under the impression that Frank is a powerful figure in the borough and can help him, but his uncle suggests that his nephew consider vocational school. Instead, Leo starts working with Willie, who Frank entrusts with keeping the various city officials who award subway contracts happy with cash or Knicks tickets.

Willie is also in charge of a crew who routinely go to the railyards to wreck the equipment of the competition. Leo comes along as a lookout, but things get out of hand; Willie kills a night watchman, and Leo puts a cop in the hospital. Not sure Leo can be trusted to keep quiet if he’s arrested, Willie reluctantly notifies him that he has to take care of the cop.

Production history 
James Gray was a graduate of USC Film School. His debut feature – a deliberately paced crime drama starring Tim Roth called Little Odessa – had been well received in 1994. Gray’s father worked for a company that supplied New York subways, and for his sophomore effort, Gray was writing a script incorporating stories he’d heard, along with tales of corruption in the city during the ’80s.

Gray’s script was close to 200 pages long. Harvey Weinstein – co-chairman of Miramax Films with his brother Bob – demanded that Gray get it into focus. He was allowed to bring in a classmate from USC named Matt Reeves to rewrite it. The strength of their finished product attracted Mark Wahlberg, who had just become a star, and Joaquin Phoenix and Charlize Theron, who were on the verge of becoming stars.

With a budget of $17.7 million, The Yards went before the cameras in the summer of 1998. Gray delivered his cut of the picture in September. Put before a test audience, it did not score well. Weinstein insisted on an ending that was more upbeat, which Gray conceded to and shot over three days in May 1999. Miramax was still not pleased with the response the film was getting, and buried it for another year in post-production.

Gray received an invitation to screen The Yards at the Cannes Film Festival in May 2000. Reaction was mixed. Some critics praised the artistry of the film’s look, while many panned its clichéd plot. It was finally released in October 2000 – without TV commercials – in only 150 theaters. It disappeared with less than $1 million at the U.S. box office.

Opinion 
The Yards landed on a few top ten critics lists that year, but it wouldn’t surprise me if after further reflection, it ends up on some lists of the best films of the decade. The story is old hat, but absolutely nothing about the way Gray frames that story is. He favors a quiet, elegant ambiance, and cast actors who give some of the greatest performances of their careers.

With director of photography Harris Savides, Gray bathes the film in painterly melancholy. It’s like Michael Mann low budget; a crime film, but one replacing macho intensity with seductive beauty. Rooms are as dim as any since Gordon Willis lit The Godfather. Characters whisper, hold back their emotions. There’s no more joy than you’d encounter at a funeral wake, but Gray isn’t making a fun B-movie here. This is an A-film with style and class.

Mark Wahlberg’s role is one he was born to play – a working class kid brooding with menace and resentment – and he gives a career performance. Joaquin Phoenix is as charismatic as Wahlberg is restrained, demonstrating brilliant emotional range. Theron shows equal if not greater depth. She has a scene with James Caan where she swallows her pride and begs her stepfather to help Wahlberg that blew me away in how soulful she plays it.

The film flawlessly cast, pairing two generations of terrific actors. Caan and Dunaway are sublime in this, expressing so much with a bare minimum of dialogue, while Ellen Burstyn’s chemistry with Wahlberg is something special. I cannot praise the performances in this film enough. Costume designer Michael Clancy and art director Judy Rhee deserve a lot of credit. This cast looks working class.

Composer Howard Shore adapted “Saturn” from Gustav Holst’s Planets Suite, but the film uses little music and even less dialogue, instead utilizing terrific sound design to set a vivid mood among the rustic railyards. The story is as old as the hills; Gray had to know this would never appeal to a mass audience. I didn’t exactly go bananas for The Yards in 2000, but I’m bananas about it now, and strongly recommend it.

“The film reminds one of Edward Hopper’s paintings, especially his city scenes … So, it’s kind of a letdown that what happens in the interim is somewhat familiar,” writes Michael W. Phillips Jr. at goatdog’s movies. He gives it 3 out of 5 goats.

Neil Young at Jigsaw Lounge says, “In retrospect it’s all a little ’so what-ish’, a film so concerned with being serious and mature and important it ends up weighing itself down like one of its own subway cars.”

“While writer/director James Gray tells the story with an impressive urban palate, set in and around the Queens subway car yards, it never really catches fire,” writes Jeffrey Anderson at Combustible Celluloid.

© Joe Valdez

After exploring the art of remakes, I’m embarking on a quest for some bona fide art cinema. Here’s the last of five articles on the films of Michelangelo Antonioni (1912-2007). I wrote this while sipping coffee product I can neither spell nor pronounce.

By Joe Valdez

Walking out on her boyfriend (Francisco Rabal) after what appears to have been an exhaustive all-night break up, Vittoria (Monica Vitti) seeks a sympathetic ear. She wanders over to the Roman Stock Exchange, where she finds her mother gambling. A young, energetic stockbroker named Piero (Alain Delon) is more interested in Vittoria than her mother seems to be in her.

Up late, Vittoria receives a visit from her neighbor Anita (Rossana Rory). They attract the attention of Marta (Mirella Ricciardi), who invites them to her apartment. Marta is daughter of a planter in Kenya. She reminisces about Africa and disparages the Kenyans for attempting to expel Europeans from the country. The party breaks up when Marta’s dog escapes and Vittoria goes searching for it.

A stock market crash costs Vittoria’s mother millions of lira and forces Piero to begin collecting from his various clients. He finds the time to woo Vittoria. Though attracted to him, her feelings of restlessness keep her aloof from his charms. As they spend time walking through sunny Rome, the city seems to physically personify the emptiness that Vittoria feels about the modern world.

Directed by Michelangelo Antonioni and co-written with Tonino Guerra from a story by Elio Bartolini & Ottiero Ottieri, L’Eclisse marked the end of a loosely connected trilogy (including L’Avventura and La Notte) exploring love and alienation among the nouveau riche of postwar Italy. Many – like Kimberly at Cinebeats – consider this the best, even one of the greatest foreign films of all time.

Abandoning conventional narrative, employing long takes and longer running times, asking questions instead of answering them, all of the films in this series have amazed and frustrated me to varying degrees. L’Eclisse ultimately wore me out. Moments of sublime beauty are undone by tediousness, and that’s before Antonioni arrives at one of the more esoteric finales I’ve endured in recent memory.

Antonioni captures the energy of the Roman Stock Exchange with a terrific eye, while a scene where Monica Vitti comes across flagpoles harmonizing in the night wind inspires both awe and unease. Vitti is vibrant opposite Alain Delon, but the film becomes more pretentious in its imagery, until Antonioni can’t be bothered to even have his stars on screen for the final, baffling seven minutes. Never a fan of music, the minimal score here is particularly wretched.

“It has moments of beauty and clarity that will shift your soul into a position of pure pleasure, and it contains performances that perfectly capture the melancholy and the restlessness … But it’s also unrewarding and a little distant, the kind of movie that requires an investment of time and temperament that many moviegoers no longer possess,” writes Bruce Gibron at DVD Talk.

Alex McDonald at State of the Arts says, “Even after over forty years it remains an enigmatic piece of cinema and an unnerving depiction of love in an atomized world.”

Monica Vitti, nocturnal Rome, flagpoles in the breeze. View a beautiful scene in a very problematic film.