The thing about Sean Penn, besides all the things there can be about Sean Penn, is that Into the Wild was a) too reverent of someone who didn’t deserve it and b) half an hour too long. So I was low on patience with that guy when I went into Witch Hunt, a wild card film I chose late Friday.
In the 80s a new district attorney, Ed Jagels, was elected in Bakersfield, CA, and he decided the jails weren’t full enough. A handful of working class couples with no criminal records were rounded up and slammed with child molestation counts, many of them leveled by their own children. It turned out all of the children were coerced, and took between one and two decades of time served to clear the parents, who’d all received literally multi-hundred-year sentences. It’s a pretty sensational story. Too bad it’s overwrought (you can thank the plaintive acoustic guitar soundtrack for half of it and the film-school inserts of dewed grass and sunsets for the other), partially shot on shoddy digital video and includes only archival footage of Jagels (a title card at the end announces he refused to take part in the film) and zero interviews with any of the cops or social workers who helped lead what really was a gross miscarriage of justice. An episode of Investigative Reports on A&E is better produced, despite a few moments of genuine provocation and poignancy.
Perhaps I was set off by the press notes, which touted Penn’s “unflinching narration,” which give me a freaking break.
On a brief drugstore break on Bloor I ran into Halifax filmmaker (and Genie nominee) Marc Almon who’s here for the year as a producing fellow at the Canadian Film Centre. We headed into Edison and Leo, which is being touted as the first stop-motion animation feature ever made in Canada. It’s about crazy Thomas Edison being driven mad by power and a magical book belonging to an all-female tribe of native women, and his son who is struck by lightning and can no longer touch people because he’ll hurt them.
It’s an interesting effort but tonally all over the place – it’s launched like a fairytale, takes a sharp turn into sex farce and a steep dip into gore, as if director Neil Burns thought this might be his only chance to make a movie and shoehorned in all of his influences. With 20 minutes cut out it might work better, because it’s got inspired moments of humour and some nice voice work from Powers Boothe and dreamy Gregory “Ephram Brown” Smith. (It also made me recall one of my favourite Simpsons. This movie confirmed Homer’s assertion of “That’s where you’re wrong, Marge, he was a shameless self-promoter!”
The weekend kicked off (you’ll see I did there momentarily) with another doc, Harvard Beats Yale 29-29. But Thorney, you’re thinking, that’s a tie score. Here’s the thing. Picture it: Cambridge, 1968. The Yale and Harvard football teams are both undefeated and playing each other for the last time in the season. It’s not a championship, not an important game by any means, but the two schools have always been rivals and it matters. Yale dominates for the bulk, heading into the third quarter at 29-13.
And Harvard manages to tie it up in the last 42 seconds of the game. It’s like a Disney production starring Dennis Quaid!
Without the full game footage from Harvard’s TV station – it’s held up well for 40 years, and the wry, smart narration from Don Gillis is a delight – the movie would just be old dudes reminiscing about their Ivy League football years (and you can tell a lot of them have never done any better). There are brief dips into Hollywood — Tommy Lee Jones was on the Harvard team (though I heard a New England-sounding dude carping afterward that “he had nothing to do with the game” in the story the movie tells, which appears to be true), rooming with Al Gore, while one of the Yale players roomed with George Bush and still another talked about his “girlfriend coming up from Vassar for the weekend…I was dating Meryl Streep at the time”; the diversions help glitz up the story a touch. Because like Witch Hunt it’s a perfectly fine, one-sided doc destined for pay cable at best. I liked it better, mostly because the game really was a nail biter, and it was astounding to watch Yale throw it away.
Onto my first press conference of the day, for Ghost Town. Ricky Gervais spoke of his atheism while Kristen motherfucking Wiig sat beside him (in acid wash!) with a cross dangling from her neck. Awkward.
Kristen Wiig, Ricky Gervais and Greg Kinnear
I really hate that I know Ms. Wiig is wearing Louboutins. This is for you SCF.
Onto the next conference for a movie I have not seen yet called It Might Get Loud, about the history of the electric guitar. It starred some guys you might recognize:
Jack White just realized I am still mad about that annoying fucking day when he had that secret show in Halifax and my phone was ringing off the hook and I did not care. The Edge is like, whatever.
The director is Davis Guggenheim (An Inconvenient Truth) who took pictures, including one of me pointing my microphone at the panel, with a slide stills camera, a goofy grin on his face as he stared across three generations of rock.
An annoying thing was that a dude at the beginning asked us to keep questions to the movie, not individual careers/bands, and FOUR people asked Jimmy Page about a Zeppelin reunion.
I hung out with my friend and former Haligonian Shayla Howell on the red carpet at the Elgin where she chatted with Deepa Mehta and her peeps from Heaven on Earth. A girl tapped me on the shoulder. “Who’s that blonde girl everybody’s talking to?”
UM:
Everyone had gone in when an announcement rippled down the line that Ellen Bernstein was on her way in. Shayla, crouched on the floor, looked up. “Who’s Ellen Bernstein?” I looked to the doorway and saw a flash of white hair. I leaned down and hissed, “Dude, Ellen Burstyn.” Shayla and her cameraman rocketed straight up, ready in seconds, but seconds were all it took for Ms. Burstyn to breeze by them without stopping, and that was that.
This article appears in Sep 4-10, 2008.
