"You're a tomato!"*

I really loved watching Sydney Pollack every time he appeared in a movie. He was amazing as Dustin Hoffman's agent in Tootsie. The scenes where he argues with Hoffman are delightful. He was great in Michael Clayton and even in those nice Cingular commercials about not using cellphones while in the movies. He was a wonderful actor. He produced a great variety of nifty movies big and small. He fought against colorization of black and white films. He had a long, distinguished career in Hollywood. But, let's face it, he was not a brilliant director.

A.O. Scott writes a fitting appraisal of Pollack's work in the NY Times today. He is far more generous with his directorial work than I would be. The only movies of his I like are Tootsie and They Shoot Horses, Don't They. For one, I never saw what people saw in Robert Redford (another nice guy who is better at things other than his day job), so I bypassed stuff like The Way We Were and the Condor films.
Still, I really liked Sydney Pollack. A sad loss for Hollywood.

* I love this scene in Tootsie between Pollack and Hoffman. Hoffman is being a difficult picky actor and Pollack is at the end of his rope. Lovely.

Stalinists Accuse Hollywood of Lying

Members of the Russian Communist party have called for the new Indiana Jones film to be banned in the country because they say it distorts history.
Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, set during the Cold War, sees Harrison Ford's character battle Cate Blanchett's evil KGB agent.
St Petersburg Communist Party chief Sergei Malinkovich told the Reuters news agency it was "rubbish".
"Why should we agree to that sort of lie and let the West trick our youth?"
He said many Russian cinemagoers were teenagers who would be "completely unaware of what happened in 1957", when the film is set.

Well, that's rich. This from people who used to erase actual people from photographs, among other sinister distortions of history.
What could be more pathetic than being a communist today? They've got to be the most clueless, irrelevant people in the planet. They would be funny if they weren't so mindbottlingly stupid:

"It's rubbish... In 1957 the communists did not run with crystal skulls throughout the US."
The Associated Press news agency quoted Moscow Communist official Andrei Andreyev as saying: "It is very disturbing if talented directors want to provoke a new Cold War."

As always, blame it on the Jews.

XXY

This excellent film by Argentinian writer/director Lucía Puenzo deals with a family's problem with hermaphroditism. That is, a couple have a teenage daughter who is half woman and half man. What is remarkable about the movie is the intelligence and the maturity with which it deals with the topic. Because she is a teenager and is starting to come of age, the family has reached a critical point in which a decision must be made about what sex is she going to be. It is hard because, Alex, the protagonist, doesn't really know it herself. The young actress who plays Alex starts out acting like a freak, a particularly difficult teenager (aren't all teenagers freaks by definition?), but one warms up to her because she goes through these extremes of pain and defiance and sheer confusion. She is amazing.
It's hard to talk about this movie without giving it away and there is so much that is bracing and interesting about it, that I don't really want to go into it. For those of you who don't live anywhere near the tiny screen of the Cinema Village where XXY is showing, I'm sure it will make it's way to Netflix. It won an important prize at Cannes last year.
In all, the cast is excellent, the script is extremely compelling, strong but moving, without ever (except in one scene) resorting to cliché or sentimentality. XXY is the movie equivalent of tough love, fierce and compassionate. Well worth watching.

That Stupid Louis Vuitton Ad

Several times, in respectable arthouse cinemas in this city, we have been subjected to an ad from Louis Vuitton, which pretends to be more like a short, dreamy movie, until you start seeing the luggage. Soft focus landscapes of rich white people traveling, always almost alone in the frame, looking bored, like all rich people. When the tagline and the brand name get revealed, the audience response has been unequivocal every time: Bronx cheers, cursing, booing, hurling abuse at the screen.
Not that I would ever buy one of those crappy bags, but the ad makes you feel like effecting a boycott anyway.
This waste of money and talent is directed to the wrong kind of people.
The people who would think this is a great commercial and would go and buy one of those preposterous shit-colored bags, are the same bridge and tunnel people who pack the meatpacking district every weekend and who buy their Louis Vuitton knockoffs in Chinatown. They are the girls who want to be like Carrie and Samantha. The people who like Pretty Woman. People who read People. And Vogue (that is, people who could not afford one measly coin holder from LV). That is, not the same people who watch obscure movies with subtitles at the Cinema Village or the Angelika.

Time to Brag

It has been rejected by a lot of festivals here in the US, for reasons that are truly mysterious to me, but my short film Close Relations has been accepted at the Swansea Life Film Festival, in Wales, and it is in the Best Short competition.
I've always liked the Welsh. They gave us, among other treasures, Richard Burton, and my beloved Christian Bale, so I am immensely grateful.