The Illusionist is a strange story that is part The Usual Suspects, part Masterpiece Theatre. Set in turn of the century Vienna, the story mixes political intrigue, love and magic into a sparkling confection that mesmerizes the eye and the mind.
Ed Norton plays Eisenheim the Illusionist, a stage magician who possesses powers greater than any of his contemporaries. He is tall, elegant and mysterious. In one elaborate trick—which is based on an actual illusion performed by the legendary Robert Houdin—an orange tree grows on stage, bears fruit and for the finale, two butterflies fly from the tree carrying a handkerchief previously borrowed from an audience member.
When the magician baffles and embarrasses a member of the royal family—who also happens to be engaged to his childhood sweetheart—Eisenheim’s act comes under the scrutiny of the power hungry Inspector Uhl, played by Paul Giamatti. Like Eisenheim’s magical orange tree the story blossoms before our eyes, but keeping it’s inner workings under wraps. There is more going on here than meets the eye, and director Neil Burger skillfully juggles the murder mystery, mystical and magical elements of the story.
Edward Norton hands in his usual adroit performance as Eisenheim. Smooth and polished, his portrayal of the magician is powerful, with the only major problem being the bizarre accent he uses. It may be historically correct, but it sounds too mannered and prissy.
In a story full of wonder, it is Paul Giamatti who really amazes. As Inspector Uhl Giamatti completely sheds the Joe-Schmo persona that marks his most famous roles and delivers a polished portrait of a power hungry man who will not let the truth stand in the way of climbing up the political ladder. He plays a policeman, who ironically, steals the movie from the rest of the cast.
The Illusionist is a rarity, an independent period piece. The film was made on a budget, and was budgeted at a fraction of what a comparable Hollywood film would cost, but you would never know it. It is a sumptuous looking film about the nature of power and the power of people to believe in something they don’t understand.
Lady in the Water is a story originally conceived by Sixth Sense director M. Night Shyamalan for his children. It’s a modern fairy tale about an unassuming building manager, Cleveland Heep (Paul Giamatti), who saves an ethereal young woman (Bryce Dallas Howard) from danger only to discover that she a narf, a character from a bedtime story who is trying to make the perilous journey from our world back to hers. Heep and the tenants of the apartment complex work together to protect their new delicate friend from the scrunt, a deadly creature who is determined to prevent her from returning home.
The Lady in the Water is easily the oddest and most audacious film of the summer blockbuster season. Shyamalan is one of the most successful directors of the last decade, having huge hits with films like The Sixth Sense and Signs that were heavy on atmosphere and surprising plots twists but in Lady in the Lake he plays it straight, more or less. Don’t expect a twist at the end—the last Shyamalan film, The Village, was ruined for me because I spent the whole movie anticipating the twist and never connected with the plot—but the story isn’t exactly clear-cut.
The viewer is asked to follow a fable that unfolds slowly, and is filled unusual characters and strange mythology. It’s the soul of the movie and it will either work for you or it won’t. I thought the mythology was a bit too contrived, and a little bit too much like watching a long game of Dungeons and Dragons, complete with narfs, beasts, guilds, and healers. The intricate fable slows down the story, getting in the way of the moral—that people should consider their purpose on earth—and gets increasingly ludicrous as the movie plods along.
The main reason to watch is to see good actors doing good work. Paul Giamatti hands in another likeable performance that shows why he is one of the best actors working in mainstream movies today. Bryce Dallas Howard as the title character has a naturally brittle otherworldly look that works very well. In supporting roles Bob Balaban is amusing as an self-important film critic (is there any other kind?) who meets a nasty end—I’m sure Shyamalan enjoyed writing that part after the lambasting he took on his last film—and the director himself takes on his largest (and most ego stroking) part to date as a writer destined to become a prophet of sorts.
Lady in the Water is a frustrating movie. It’s not awful by any means, it has good performances and it looks beautiful, but it isn’t really successful either. What’s missing here is a strong hand in terms of interesting story telling. At it’s best it is a refreshing attempt to steer a summer blockbuster into more interesting ground, but at it’s worst does what all bedtime fables are supposed to do—put you to sleep.
For once a movie really lives up to its title. The name Shoot ‘Em Up is the perfect label for this action flick in which Clive Owen’s character uses 18 different guns, fires off countless rounds and spills (according to IMDB) 15 gallons of fake blood. Finally there’s some truth in advertising. Now the question is whether or not you want to rent a movie so over-the-top it makes Natural Born Killers look subtle.
Owen is the singularly named Smith (like Cher or Madonna only with big guns), a carrot-chomping transient with an extensive military background. He has stepped away from polite society in the hopes of leading his own, quiet life. Of course that hasn’t worked out for him—otherwise this movie would be called Leave ‘Em Alone. Instead of tranquility he finds himself embroiled in Byzantine political conspiracy, on the run with a baby and a prostitute (Monica Bellucci) all the while tracked by a bloodthirsty hit man named Hertz (Paul Giamatti) and a swarm of assorted bad guys.
Shoot ‘Em Up is kind of review proof. If it is crazy action you want then you’ll love it. If not, the frenetic pace and relentless bang bang of the movie will be headache inducing. It’s that simple.
I thought it was great mindless fun and at least features good actors—Owen and Giamatti are both Oscar nominees—who seem to be having fun shooting guns and uttering snappy one liners like, “Guns don’t kill people! But they sure help!”
Last year Robert Pattinson, Paul Giamatti and homegrown stars Emily Hampshire, Sarah Gadon and Kevin Durand gathered in Toronto to shoot Cosmopolis, a dark drama for director David Cronenberg.
On Monday the cast reunited with their director for a press conference I hosted at a downtown Toronto hotel in advance of the movie opening in theatres on Friday.
The tone of the conference was light, and the camaraderie of the cast obvious. Here are some of the highlights:
“I don’t know what I was more excited about,” said Hampshire, “having David bend over me and show Robert how to get a prostate exam, or Rob bending over me and getting one.”
“You don’t have to choose,” quipped Cronenberg.
Cronenberg also offered up some tongue-in-cheek advice for filmmakers. “I use a little Apple program called iDirector. A little green light goes on if it is OK, or a red light if you need to do another take. It’s pretty straightforward. You can all use it.”
Later the director commented on why he wanted his actors to speak the lines of the script exactly as written. “I don’t want the actors to be screenwriters,” he said, “they’re not designed for that.”
“There were no rewrites,” Pattinson chimes in.
“Normally that is the first thing you think about as an actor. And you are so used to just changing it the whole time, on every single movie, that with this, once you suddenly got to the idea that you are not changing anything, the script is fine, it’s you that are the problem, at least you knew one thing.”
Pattinson has a tour-de-force scene at the end of the film, a 22-page two-hander opposite Oscar nominee Paul Giamatti. The Sideways star took a quick break from shooting Rock of Ages in Miami to appear in Cosmopolis.
“Fortunately the other movie wasn’t terribly demanding on me,” Giamatti joked. “It was a musical that I was doing and I didn’t have to sing or dance. I just had to show up and crack jokes.”
“I was panicked about it,” he says of his quick turnaround in Toronto.
“This thing was intimidating. The length and the language. So I bothered everyone on the other movie to read this thing with me. Fortunately Malin Ackerman made a great Rob Pattinson.
“She was fantastic. I was very disappointed when actually I got here and it was Rob.”
In February 2005 I saw Paul Giamatti, the self confessed “funny looking leading man” and star of Sideways and the upcoming Barney’s Version, waiting at a departure lounge at LAX. It’s not unusual to see a star at Los Angeles’s biggest airport, but it is strange to see one outside the First Class Lounge, reading a tattered science fiction novel with a knapsack shaped suspiciously like a SAG award. (He had won the Outstanding Performance by a Cast in a Motion Picture award the night before along with Sideways cast mates Thomas Haden Church, Virginia Madsen and Sandra Oh.)
“I prefer sitting down by the gate because I‘m afraid I’m going to miss the plane,” he says when I remind him of the day. “I get uncomfortable in those places. It just feels funny. There is no more classist place on earth than in an airport. It makes me uncomfortable.”
The 43-year-old actor is also somewhat uncomfortable with the fame Sideways brought him.
“You can’t avoid [fame] when you are exposed as much as you are in movies,” he says. “It made me uncomfortable at first. Would I prefer to be anonymous all the time? Yeah, I would because I like it and I also feel it is a precious thing as an actor. It goes away and you just have to go with it I suppose. At a certain point I tried to cop an attitude of saying, ‘Well these people come up and talk to me and so it is actually an opportunity. I don’t have the anonymity but I can observe these people now.’”
People watching is an important tool for an actor, but Giamatti admits that his adopted home town of New York—he’s from New Haven, Connecticut originally—while still interesting and diverse, isn’t as rich a source as it once was.
“New York has changed a lot,” he says. “I don’t know what happened to a lot of the people you used to see [in the city] that were absolutely jaws dropping. You would see things that weren’t just fascinating to study; you would see things that you could not believe you were seeing. People in a condition you couldn’t believe you were seeing. People behaving in ways you couldn’t believe. That doesn’t quite happen as much in New York anymore. It’s a little bit less insane than it used to be.”
His latest role takes him far away from New York, all the way to Canada. Montréal to be specific. In Barney’s Version Giamatti brings to life Barney Panofsky, one of the most iconic characters in Canadian literature. When he accepted the role, however, the Oscar nominee didn’t realize how well loved the book is in Canada.
“It was a gradual realization,” he said. “I did an interview in Rome [during the shoot] with Canadian television and somebody said to me, ‘Wow, you must be really nervous,’ and I thought ‘Jesus Christ, I wasn’t until now.’ I think I was mostly feeling that I’m an American guy and I don’t want to screw up something precious to Canadians.”
In his typical humble way Giamatti adds, “Part of me thinks that I don’t want everyone, when they read the book, to only see me,” he says. “I hope people can still see what they want to see in the book and separate the two. Hopefully they exist as two different beasts.”
The opening shot of “Win Win,” a new dramedy from “The Station Agent” director Tom McCarthy, tells you almost everything you need to know about the main character, played by Paul Giamatti. Dressed in a tacky bright yellow New Providence Pioneers sweatshirt he’s jogging down a country road. The camera stays with him for a moment until two other, better-dressed older men pass him, running at a loping gait. Breathing heavy, he stops and watches the pair fade into the distance.
The scene tells us, wordlessly and elegantly, that he, no matter how hard he tries, is always getting passed by in life. It’s a quick scene, but what would have been a throwaway in most movies becomes a poignant opening to one of the most enjoyable movies of the year so far.
Giamatti is small-town lawyer and wrestling coach Mike Flaherty. With his practice on the ropes he make a dubious decision to become the legal guardian to client Leo Poplar (Burt Young), a wealthy man suffering from dementia. He desperately needs the $1500 a month pay cheque that comes along with the guardianship, but when Leo’s grandson Kyle (Alex Shaffer) shows up the arrangement becomes complicated.
While there is much to admire in “Win Win,” like the great performances from old pros Giamatti or Amy Ryan, or the stirring work from newcomer Alex Shaffer or even how funny it is, the thing that really stands out about “Win Win” is its heart. McCarthy understands family and friend relationships and it shows in every frame of this film.
These are complicated characters with back stories and shortcomings galore, but McCarthy deftly shows us their relationships, exposing why they behave the way they do, why they like one another, and ultimately why we should care about them.
Part of it is casting—Giamatti is never bad and Shaffer is a thoroughly believable teen—but McCarthy, as writer and director, has to take the credit. It’s a tricky dance to introduce so many story threads—there’s a wrestling subplot, the story of Leo’s living arrangements, the drug addict mother’s relationship with Kyle and more—but McCarthy keep the film on track, keeping the focus where it belongs, on the characters.
Buried director Rodrigo Cortés on his admiration for Ryan Reynolds
“I hope that all Canadians are not like Ryan Reynolds because that embarrasses the world. People like him should be forbidden.”
Woody Allen on aging
“I’ll be 75 in another couple of months and I do see myself as becoming waning and decrepit.”
Jacob Tierney on working with a cat in Good Neighbours:
“He starred in 300. That’s the cat from 300. Do you know how many times the trainer told me that? I was like, ‘Awesome. Shall I talk to his agent?’”
Paul Giamatti on the famous “merlot” line in Sideways:
“The funniest thing about that line is the only reason it is merlot is that we tried all these different wines and that was the only one that was funny… was the word merlot. For some reason that sounded funnier than chardonnay.”
Josh Brolin on Diane Lane:
“If you look at my wife’s boobs you’ll see that she doesn’t need a boob job.”
Barney’s Version, based on Mordecai Richler’s final novel, gives Paul Giamatti his most memorable part since Sideways. Utterly compelling as the kind of guy who calls his ex-wife’s new husband with the offer of some nude pictures, “so you can see what she looked like in her prime,” he glides—or more rightly put, drunkenly stumbles—through three wives, an accusation of murder and countless cigars toward a battle with Alzheimer’s Disease. While the filmmaking occasionally veers into television movie territory Giamatti and cast—Dustin Hoffman, Rosamund Pike and Minnie Driver—are by turns touching, caustic and hilarious but above all, entertaining.
I’s been awhile since there’s been a good animated ant movie in the theatres. In 1998 there were two—Antz and A Bug’s Life—but ant lovers can rejoice as The Ant Bully comes to theatres today. Adapted from a kid’s book that the movie’s producer, Tom Hanks, used to read to his son, The Ant Bully is the story of a lonely ten-year-old boy who is bullied by the neighborhood kids so he takes out his frustrations on the only thing smaller than him—the ants in his yard. That is until the day the ants come up with a potion that cuts this anthropoid down to size—ant size. It’s kind of a Honey I Shrunk the Kids with insects.
Inventively animated—the director John A Davis seems to have taken his inspiration not from kid’s movies but from the great science fiction look of 1950’s films like The Day the Earth Stood Still—The Ant Bully features the standard moral lessons for kids about cooperation, equality and kindness, but sells those messages with a great deal of gentle humor.
The ant society is effectively compared and contrasted to the human world, displaying the differences in a hilarious scene featuring a firecracker that could be potentially devastating to the ants but makes barely a pop in the human world, and the similarities in the interpersonal relationships. The movie takes its first third to really get in gear, but with the voice work of Julia Roberts, Paul Giamatti, Nicolas Cage, Meryl Streep and Lily Tomlin it soon finds its footing.
Voice work aside the best reason to see this movie are the incredible visuals. The inner workings of the ant colony are particularly well realized, as are the incredible wasps, which look like high-tech aircrafts as much as insects.
