All posts by Norm Wilner

Movies, Pointless Personal Digressions

Because I Got High

If you squint, you can see my obligationsThis is not a codeine post, although my toothache is a little better today, thanks to the antibiotics and a carefully calibrated schedule of painkillers. (There should be a very small window between one Fun Size Advil wearing off and the next one kicking in, and I am doing my best to nail that sucker shut.)

No, this is a post about going up a mountain. Which we did this afternoon, thanks to that schedule change I mentioned in yesterday’s post. The photograph to the right was taken about 9000 feet above the desert floor, on Mt. San Jacinto.

To get there, you have to take a tram. This is a very impressive cable car thing that takes about ten minutes to go from the lower station (elevation: 2600 feet) to the upper station (8500 feet), and offers a spectacular view of the mountain ranges encircling the Palm Springs area. It also lets you determine which of your fellow jurors are acrophobic, and which of them delight in torturing the acrophobe.

Once you’re up there, you put on the warm jacket you were instructed to bring — it being a full season cooler up at the top — and you go wandering along a trail looking for bobcats. You don’t find any, because bobcats aren’t stupid and stay well away from people, but you enjoy yourself anyway. You also wonder if maybe your painkiller-addled brain is reacting to the altitude, but things seem to be going fine.

About half an hour of trudging and slipping later (and to think I considered leaving my Blundstones at home), you round a bend and find yourself atop an outcropping, staring out at the desert below. You think: Wow, this elevation even makes the desert look pretty. And then: I wonder how far my spit would go if I leaned all the way forward and really made an effort.

It’s at this point that you realize you are not at your best, and slowly settle back on the big rock, and let someone take your picture. And then you trudge back to the cable car, and go back to the film festival.

Movies, Pointless Personal Digressions

Pressure

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Everything's bigger in AmericaSorry I didn’t post an update yesterday — the schedule was pretty crowded, with five movies in 12 hours, but then I had to squeeze in an emergency trip to the dentist.

The tooth is back.

Well, not back, exactly, but back to being a problem. It started feeling irritated again on Saturday, and by yesterday it was a full-on throbbing horror, so our increasingly invaluable jury wrangler found me a dental clinic just a couple of blocks from our hotel — and from the Regal, which was hosting three of our five films.

A couple of X-rays confirmed the diagnosis: Infection, swelling, serious pain, just like last time. And just like last time, I was given a prescription for antibiotics and megadoses of ibuprofen, though this time the very nice dentist threw in a few Tylenol 3s to help me sleep through the night. (He offered Vicodin first, but after seeing what it’s done to that nice Dr. House, I asked for something with a little less kick.)

So I’m a pillhead again, though I’m being careful to stay off the heavy stuff during the day. Not that certain titles wouldn’t have been improved if viewed through a narcotic haze, mind you.

A schedule adjustment has reduced today’s load to four films rather than five, so that’s a relief. And the antibiotics should start to kick in tonight.

That will be nice.

Movies

Watch Out for Snakes!

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Casey Affleck's out here somewhereIndian movie, not so great. But Indian Canyons — now, that was something.

If one is very lucky, FIPRESCI jury duty isn’t all movies and lattes; sometimes, one gets to experience a little of the host city beyond its megaplexes and coffee shops. There won’t be any of that tomorrow or Tuesday, but today our gracious jury wrangler took us out to the wilds for a mile-long hike along the foot trail through Andreas Canyon.

(Well, all of us except for one member who’s recuperating from a back injury, and really wouldn’t have been up for scuttling over rock outcroppings for an hour and a half. But the rest of us managed.)

I’ve been out to California a few times before, but never had the experience of going out to the raw earth … there’s nothing like this in L.A. or San Francisco, and Santa Barbara, on its wide, flat mesa, didn’t offer much in the way of angled hiking.

This, though … this was the West, or at least the West the way it was in every cowboy movie I saw as a kid — brush and cactus and sagebrush and sawgrass, all surrounded by magnificent rock formations and dotted with holes where the rattlers have made their burrows. And every ten minutes, all the minor struggling was rewarded with another gorgeous vista.

I’m not an outdoorsy guy. But this has been the highlight of my trip so far. After this, it seems almost wasteful to spend so much time indoors, watching movies and drinking coffee.

That said, it’s been pretty good coffee. And tonight’s party is at an Italian restaurant, which seems like a very good idea: All that walking can give a dude a powerful thirst.

I’ll do my best to strike a balance, somehow. And I’ll keep you posted.

Movies

Party All the Time

Later, I went out and assassinated a foreign operativeThe demands of a film-festival juror are very difficult. You start your morning with a two-hour Filipino melodrama about a 12-year-old aspiring ladyboy with a criminal family who develops a crush on the understanding new policeman in the neighborhood.

Then — because you’re kind of an idiot — you pass up a beautiful California afternoon outdoors to see David Lynch’s three-hour sketchbook “Inland Empire”, even though it’s not eligible for your award, and even though it becomes apparent well within the first act that the man’s creativity is running on fumes.

Afterward, because you need to clear your head a bit, you walk back to the hotel and put on your monkey suit, because it’s time for the black-tie Palm Springs International Film Festival Awards Gala, a four-hour orgy of awards, alcohol and really splendid food.

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Movies, Pointless Personal Digressions

Ring-a-Ding-Ding

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Standing on the linoleum of giantsThe best thing about my job is that I never know quite where it will take me.

For instance: In December of 2004, I spent half an hour with a six-month-old Siberian tiger because Universal was promoting the DVD release of “Two Brothers“. The movie was charming but ultimately forgettable; petting a tiger cub will stay with me until my brain turns to paste.

And in September of 2002, I sat down with Joe Hunter, Jack Ashford and Bob Babbit at the Toronto film festival, for “Standing in the Shadows of Motown“. Lovely men full of great stories, and more than willing to indulge me by telling them all over again; it only hit me as I was shaking theirs hand afterward that these were the fingers that actually made the music I love so dearly. Awe is a marvelous thing.

(So is memory: It wasn’t until the next day that I realized the film’s director, Paul Justman was the same Paul Justman who’d edited the legendary Rolling Stones documentary “Cocksucker Blues”, and that he surely have had some very interesting stories of his own to tell if I’d asked.)

Anyway, the reason I bring this up now? I took the above photo in Frank Sinatra’s bathroom about four hours ago.

Continue reading Ring-a-Ding-Ding →

Movies

Equilibrium is Achieved

Props from My luggage turned up, unmolested, at about two AM. And the coffee machine in my room is working. No complaints.

Japan is calling, and I stand ready to face the day. With fresh contacts, a change of underwear and everything else that makes a man feel like a god.

… sorry. The air out here has a way of making one giddy. Or maybe it’s just the relief of not having to spend half one’s morning at the Gap outlet.

Anyway. Yes, today, the Japanese entry and then the Macedonian film, and then there are a couple of events we’re expected to attend, including one for the premiere of “Black Book“.

Social note: I’m not really a big party-circuit guy, but when presented with the chance to watch Paul Verhoeven drink, well … I am so there. Maybe he’s finally ready to own up to “Hollow Man”.

Movies

Morning in America

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Be careful, my pretty, for I am a muuuuuuuuuurderer… literally. It’s 1 AM PST, I’ve been up for 22 hours, and my luggage still hasn’t arrived. United’s phone people say it should have got here by 9:30 PM, and can’t understand why it didn’t.

Funny. I can’t understand why I’m about to go to sleep with my contacts in.

Anyway, there’s one good thing to report: Metro’s gone back to updating its website early and often, so you can read those reviews I filed from a cell phone in Vegas. With or without your contacts in.

“Happily N’Ever After“: The title’s terrible. The movie’s worse. This actually makes “Hoodwinked” look … well, like a Disney movie. Freddie Prinze, Jr. is oddly appealing as the hero, but that’s probably because we can’t see him. Sarah Michelle Gellar, not so much.

“Perfume: The Story of a Murderer“: Expensive, elaborate, excruciating. Tom Tykwer takes Patrick Suskind’s novel about a man-monster who kills women in a misguided attempt to distill their scent, and turns it into a movie too timid to really dig into all its carefully appointed muck. Paul Verhoeven, now, he would have wrestled this thing into a masterpiece.

Trivia point: This week’s new releases feature the stars of “Snow Cake“: Sigourney Weaver plays a wicked stepmother in “Happily N’Ever After”, and Alan Rickman turns up in the second half of “Perfume”, daring to give a real performance. Do you think, halfway through the “Snow Cake” shoot, they just held each other and cried?

Pointless Personal Digressions

Adventure Travel

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Hey ... that's not a snake, is it?I’m in Palm Springs, and I’m not complaining about anything. It took just some time arriving, is all I’m saying.

Toronto to Denver? Not a hitch. Well, a little bit of one — something about the flaps on the plane being slightly cranky, which meant the plane would be coming in for its landing “a little faster than usual”, which meant we’d be “escorted in” by “a few emergency vehicles”. Oh, and the elderly man who’d been wandering up and down the aisle a little earlier in the flight was acting a bit funny; were there any medical personnel on board, perhaps?

Still: The plane landed just fine and the elderly man wobbled off under his own power. It was a little unnerving to find I couldn’t connect to Denver’s WiFi service, which meant I’d be filing my reviews of “Happily N’Ever After” and “Perfume” a little close to the wire when we landed in California, but I called my editor and let her know, and she said we were cool.

Except we didn’t go to California.

Oh, we headed in that direction, initially, but about 75 minutes into the two-hour flight, the flight attendants started walking up and down the aisle nervously in that way they have when Something Very Disturbing is underway, and a couple of minutes after that, they, too, asked whether there might be a doctor in the house.

There were, in fact, two doctors — a pediatrician, sitting directly in front of me, and someone else further back in the plane to whom my guy ultimately deferred. It seems an elderly woman was showing the symptoms of a stroke, and after a few minutes’ time the captain picked up the PA and told us we’d be making an emergency stop in Las Vegas so that she could receive immediate medical attention.

I’ve never been to Las Vegas before. I guess I still haven’t; they wouldn’t let me off the plane, even to stand in the gangway and try to get a WiFi signal to file my reviews. I wanted to argue about it, but it’s really hard to make someone respect your puny little deadline after he’s just helped wheel a woman off to the trauma room.

Anyway. Problem solved, because I’m a genius: My new Averatec has a smart-card reader, so I popped the SD wafer out of my Treo, popped it in the Averatec, saved the Word file to the card, put the card back in the Treo, and e-mailed it from the Treo using the direct 1x connection. Took about six seconds — and probably cost a hundred bucks, what with various roaming fees — and that was that. Deadline met, obligation fulfilled.

Of course, if I really was a genius, I’d have established a Bluetooth link between my laptop and my phone and been able to send the file without having to bother with the whole SD card back-and-forth.

And, y’know, I’d have done it in Denver.

Also, when we finally reached California, my bags were missing. Don’t worry, they’ve since been found, and will be arriving here shortly.

No complaints.

Although, now that I think about it, if I’d impulsively gotten off the plane in Vegas, farted around for a couple of hours and then rented a car to drive to Palm Springs — an idea which flashed fully formed through my mind in the ten seconds between “you can’t get off unless you decide to terminate your journey here” and “okay, I’ll think of something else” — the bags would probably have reached the hotel around the same time as me.

In any event, the mountains are beautiful and liquid hand soap is distressingly cheap at the Rite-Aid. And there’s a party in an hour that I can attend in my flying ensemble of jeans, a black T-shirt and Blundstones.

Apparently I look like a Belgian documentarian.

Movies

Jury Duty

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Artist's conceptionFlying out to the Palm Springs International Film Festival tomorrow, to join my FIPRESCI colleagues in a twelve-day parade of subtitles.

Seriously: Our jury is tasked with screening all the national submissions for the Best Foreign-Language Oscar. You can find a rough list here, though there have been some changes; only fifty-five of the titles on that page are still eligible for our award.

And yes, fifty-five films in twelve days might be a daunting task, but the festival thoughtfully sent us a package of screeners back in December, so I’m arriving prepared. If I’ve got the math right, I’ll have to see less than twenty films at the festival, which leaves me a little time to catch a few non-competing titles.

I’m particularly eager to see David Lynch’s “Inland Empire”, even if it does run three hours, and Michael Verhoeven — who guaranteed himself a place in cinema heaven with “The Nasty Girl” back in 1991, but hasn’t been seen much since — is coming with his new documentary, “Unknown Soldier”. Those are the top two on my personal wanna-see list, though of course I remain open to recommendations.

I’ll do my best to post frequent updates — with photos, even! — so check back whenever you can.

Oh, and Metro’s finally put all my holiday movie reviews on its main review page, here. So that’s nice.

DVD, Pointless Personal Digressions

You Can’t Burn a Bridge if They’ve Already Taken it Up

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Rinse the blood off my aluminum… or, the year in DVDs.

Now, obviously this list is going to be somewhat incomplete, as I wasn’t on the hardcore DVD beat for the full calendar year. And come to think of it, I suppose I should address the whole Starweek thing — it’s certainly the biggest DVD story of the year, as far as I’m concerned.

First things first: I did not leave. I was dumped.

Second things second: I was dumped because some idiot at the Toronto Star believes the paper should do everything the Globe and Mail does, and when the Globe shrank its Broadcast Week magazine in the spring, reducing the page count — and cutting costs! — the Star quickly followed suit.

That meant cutting the book in half, though not reducing the size of the damnable thing, with which readers have been justly annoyed for five years now. Instead, the page count was reduced, just like Broadcast Week’s, and all the columns were being halved so that nothing substantial would change.

Since the column would now be so much shorter, it’d just make so much more financial sense to “bring it inside” — to let a staffer write it, instead of paying me as a freelancer — and that would be that. Thanks for your service, you’ve got two columns left, you’re done at the end of May.

I wanted to be pragmatic about it. The Star’s made stupid decisions before, and reversed them; after all, hadn’t Starweek dropped my column in 2001, when it jumped to the bigger format, only to resurrect it after five weeks? (Of course, things were different then; the paper was flooded with e-mails and faxes, and I had an editor who fought like the devil to keep me.)

And after the first few weeks of the “inside” column, I was sure they’d come back to me; it was just sad, it was. But, no. I forgot the most important thing about newspaper work: What’s on the page doesn’t matter, so long as the page is filled. And the back page of Starweek is indeed filled … though it seems inevitable that the paper will scrap the whole book, now that the Globe has folded the Broadcast Week listings into its Friday entertainment section.

Anyhow. Seven months after my unceremonious dismissal — which, if you’re looking for irony, was delivered by phone while I was bedridden with food poisoning, leading me to wonder whether I’d hallucinated the whole thing — I’m still without a reg’lar DVD gig. Which does pain me somewhat, because I do think I’m rather good at it.

I hope this doesn’t sound like whining. I still have my Metro gig, and I’m still writing reviews for UR and Canadian Smart Living, and it’s not like being dumped by the Star was the worst thing that happened this year. But I built a reputation and a readership over my fifteen years in those Starweek’s pages, and it does frustrate me to no longer have that outlet.

So. Anybody hiring?

Best DVDs of 2006, after the jump … because you deserve ’em.
Continue reading You Can’t Burn a Bridge if They’ve Already Taken it Up →