Cinevegas - Week 2 -Die For

"Let me just tell you a little bit about the ending."

Upon our return to the festival on Thursday Evening we got there in time for a cocktail party up in the Director's Lounge (A suite with the furniture rearranged) certainly don't mistake this for sarcasm, because one of the new appointments to the room was a bar. One of those special kind, with the word ‘Open' in front of it. I believe I've spoken of my fondness for them in previous installments. In any case it enabled Adam, Kyle and myself to be in the ideal frame of mind for the evening that followed.

Tonight we would be treated to a screening of my favorite David Lynch film Blue Velvet as well as a conversation and Q and A session with Lynch and CineVegas Creative Advisor Dennis Hopper. I remember seeing Blue Velvet in a theater in Mission Viejo all by myself. It was one of the most inspiring nights of my young life and though I've seen it several times since, seeing it in a packed house with Lynch and Frank Booth sitting just down the aisle is just one of those experiences that film buffs like myself live for.

During their chat, Hopper regaled the crowd with the story of how he came to land the part of Frank Booth. He'd gotten a hold of a copy of the script and started lobbying hard for the part. Lynch remembers numerous phonecalls with Dennis where he would speak with the utmost sincerity that he knew Frank Booth. "I'm not going to say that I am this guy, but I know him intimately." The convergence of the right director with the perfect part for an actor waiting to re-invent himself is serendipity, or kismet or synchronicity – whatever you want to call it – but this is one of the great examples of the planets aligning to everyone's benefit.

Blue Velvet (R)
Cast Dennis Hopper, Kyle MacLaughlan, Laura Dern, Isabella Rosselini, Dean Stockwell, Hope Lange

There isn't much I can tell you about this classic, that you don't already know. I will say this, it holds up wonderfully – it wasn't a picture tied to a period in time and it was a film so far ahead of its time that it's still avante gard. Few films have so successfully melded tone, story, innocence, and innocence lost in the strangeness of shadow with such virtuosity. With his films that followed and particularly for me the masterful Twin Peaks, Lynch could make weirdness cooler than any other film maker before or since.

Before the film rolled as Hopper and Lynch were making their way up the stairs, I noticed that no one had mustered up the nuts to go for a handshake and to me a handshake is worth fifty autographs. I'll just say I'm glad I was ready to meet a bold shake if it should go that way. It was like riding a bull. At that point I wouldn't have been surprised if Hopper had grabbed me by the collar and said "Baby wants to fuck."

A

This next film courtesy of author/writer/director J.J. Lask turned out to be an interesting take on the life of the mind. Following the film Lask did a Q and A to an obviously partisan crowd. I felt like the only person in the theater that hadn't taken part in the film. Though I enjoyed it quite a bit, Lask was a little off-putting. All he could do was complain about the banality of commercial films. Every film playing at every multiplex in the world sucks, their just worthless, valueless tripe bla bla bla. Obviously there's some truth to that, but I was feeling a little defensive having just seen what has to be the best film in ages just that morning in a multi-plex. Which inspired me to raise my hand and suggest that he go see Once before he condemns everything out there. He didn't seem to appreciate my recommendation so I complimented what I thought was the most interesting aspect of his film then told him I really needed to pee and excused myself.

On The Road With Judas (R)
Cast – Aaron Ruell, Kevin Corrigan, Eddie Kaye Thomas, Eleanor Hutchins, Amanda Loncar

Writer JJ Lask has turned his real life book into a film with the kind of skewed and boggling narrative probably inspired by such recent narrative twisters such as Michel Gondry (Eternal Sunshine) and Spike Jonze (Being John Malkovich) and the writer of these as well as (Adaptation) Charlie Kaufman.

As the protagonist, Lask is a novelist living in a dual fantasy world. Thus going even a step beyond Gondry and Jonze, Lask lives in an imaginary world peopled by the characters in his book, and then has actors portray the imaginary characters as though a movie was being made about these characters that exist in his mind (and his book). Actually, the movie itself (the one you watch) makes it a little clearer as to what's going on, but if you happen to wander in late, you might have a tough time playing catch-up ball.

Lask's fictional lead/Renaissance man, Judas, is both a successful entrepreneur and a dedicated computer thief. It is obvious that Lask wants us to see his Judas as representative of the exciting, larger-than-life "idealized" self - the illusion we all hang onto to some extent to help us deal with our mundane lives. A mellower version of Fight Club's Tyler Durden, but an underground hero nonetheless.

For me the film succeeds more often when it is dealing with the women that Lask introduces into his Judas' lives. Particularly when the characters and actors playing them begin commenting on Lask's handling of their lives. True, there are times when all of this gets to be a little too clever for it's own good – but I did feel like by breaking down and expanding love relationships to such a novel degree, Lask does manage to bring worthwhile insight. Though he asks the audience to crawl an awfully tangled web to reach them.

The cast was extremely engaging and all seemed intent on getting Lask's vision across. Aaron Ruell, (Napolean D's brother) and Kevin Corrigan (Kicked In The Head) are notable standouts.

Much like Adaptation, Lask toys with the fine and often blurry lines between creator and creation. At the heart of all this complicated business is a pretty simple story about a guy who must invent a more interesting life in his mind in order to deal with the boring one that his has become. And the difficulties that his heroic inventions have with women (too busy with more important matters to sustain a relationship) is nothing but the simplest of duck blinds to hide fear, failure and fear of failure behind. For those who are fans of the movies mentioned herein, On The Road With Judas will find fertile ground, but it's the kind of film that will polarize both critics and audiences.

B-

One of the coolest events that took place this year was the awarding of the Marquee Award to Anthony Hopkins to hear him speak of the 50 plus years he's been working in theater and film was just one of those rare treats that makes CineVegas well worth attending year in and year out. Each year the festival just impresses more and more. Dennis Hopper took the stage during most of Hopkins time and managed to wiggle a lot of old stories and even a few impressions out of the BeKnighted one.

There was a time when Hopkins worked as Lawrence Olivier's understudy and did a good bit of voice-over work for him back in the day. Of course he spoke a great deal about his first writing and directing effort Slipstream, and raised quite a gasp from the crowd by giving away the plot. Adam and I assume he must have forgotten that it was going to be screened after his time on stage, but he told you more about what the film is really about than I feel comfortable doing. I'd hate to spoil it. As it turned out, the ending of the film didn't necessarily go according to how he spelled it out anyway, so no harm done. Even with that little Slipupstream, his charm and wit and presence was just hypnotic and he absolutely held the audience in thrall the whole time.

Slipstream (NR)
Cast – Anthony Hopkins, Christian Slater, Jeffrey Tambor, John Turturro

Slipstream is for all intents and purposes Anthony Hopkins baby. He was the avante gardener whose "green" thumb and wheeling and dealing managed a green light few others could have swung. Debuting both as scribe and director Hopkins must be commended for making the film he wanted to make with little or no interference from anyone. He obviously had a great deal of technical assistance in bringing this most surreal and somewhat intentionally inscrutable mind-fuck into being.

Set mostly in a dusty, isolated desert diner, Slipstream begins with what at first appears to be a mostly straight-forward narrative. Almost like a Damon Runyn-ized version of Travolta and Jackson at the start of Pulp Fiction, Christian Slater and Jeffrey Tambor enter the diner and soon begin to wage a kooky campaign of terror - punctuated with unexpected bursts of violence. Pretty soon it becomes clear that what is real and imagined is anybody's guess.

The entire tableau, we learn is the product of the thoughts and imagination of Felix Bonhoffer a screenwriter whose mind has taken a slide into a slipstream. The titular state is described early on by one character in the film as "the flux between time and space when our current life collides with the life to come. Through a repeated violent and bloody quick cut we are lead to suspect that perhaps Felix has been in a car accident. An even more insightful description of the film was offered by Dennis Hopper during a conversation with Hopkins before the screening. Dennis points out the myth or truth that our life flashes before our eyes in the seconds that precede death; and Slipstream would be what we might see if we were to stretch those milliseconds into a hundred minutes.

Thus with any sort of conventional narrative tossed out the car window, it's up to each audience member to decide for themselves what message or point Hopkins is trying to put across (if indeed he is making such an attempt). It is equally incumbent upon each film goer to decide for themselves if this dissociated collection of images and truncated scenes make for an enjoyable film experience.

By dispensing with the rules of most everything - including acting, the performances of both Slater and Tambor are a hoot and John Turturro is like some implacable force of nature/loose cannon as the producer of the film that is the chief focus of much of Slipstream. Just watching the wheels go rolling off the production in such an absurdly surreal fashion was hilarious. Three members of the cast were also in Barton Fink and Hopkins gave one or two loving winks at Fink – one in particular found Turturro taking couple nasty potshots at screenwriters.

Slipstream is also festooned with literally hundreds of clips and stills, presumably of the films that inspired the director. One in particular of James Dean was prefaced in the pre-screening chat with Hopkins, as Sir Anthony shared a rather fascinating bit of synchronicity that tied his life to Dean, whom he very much admired.

Without the benefit of a story line, Hopkins must rely on his creativity, technical ingenuity, and the likeability of his cast to keep an audience from glancing at their watches, I'd say from the reaction I witnessed around me as well as the opinions of our group, it seemed to be evenly split. As for me, I'll admit there were moments where it would run flat, but on balance I was entertained and intellectually challenged enough to thumb it up. Then again in a film such as this it may have been subliminally suggested that if my thumb goes down, my thumb gets broken?

B-

In The Land of Merry Misfits (NR)

As I was watching In The Land of Merry Misfits a most unusual scenario popped into my mind, though unbidden, it helped pass the time. In this scenario I had somehow come into the knowledge as to the whereabouts of Osama Bin Laden. Along with this information I was warned that if were to ever breathe a word of my secret to a living soul my entire family would be executed before my eyes. Naturally I'm then captured by secret operatives of the CIA and tortured in order to give up my secret. I hold up well under the needlenose pliers, the electricity, bamboo chutes under the fingernails, you name it, I was not going to let my family down. Then as a last ditch attempt to make me talk, they strap me to a chair in a private screening room and subject me to those damned Merry Misfits. Let's just say that in my fantasy scenario my family buys it after about 7 minutes.

The thing is prior to the screening they tell you the story of how the film took ten years to complete and it was a labor or love for all these swell people who suffered horrible setbacks and abandoned it for years only to have one of the participants make it big in Hollywood and arrange to dust off the Misfits and get the project back of track (long breath) so you're really rooting for it, they even got John Waters to narrate – Cool! And then they roll it and within 15 minutes you're ready to set fire to your pant leg just so you have a good reason to get out of there without hurting their feelings.

I'm not going to tell you anything about it, and relive that hell. This thing gets on your nerves and stays there and the only thing I can liken it to would be to somehow find yourself locked in a storage unit with 25 two-year-olds, with nothing to settle them down but warm water. I've seen bad movies, but none of them caused my eyeballs to bleed and my hair to ache.

As I watched it I was racking my brain for something positive to say about it or maybe some sort of way it could be put to good use. So I thought "what's the worst movie that's going to come out this year? Probably Daddy Day Camp, right?" The trailer is beyond awful. So I'm thinking instead of showing the DDC Trailer, they could show two minutes from the Merry Misfits and at the end put up big titles that say "This is not Daddy Day Camp." Then slap up the logo for Daddy Day Camp and a picture of Cuba Gooding Junior. Two wrongs faking a right. I don't know, but good Lord I feel sorry for anybody that liked that thing.

H-