Famous people talked to me? NYFF edition.

So here are some New York Film Festival flashbacks, when I got to talk to Steven Soderbergh and Mickey Rourke as part of the Festival's superawesome press set-up.

Everyone knows that I sometimes have a tumultuous relationship with my corporate overlords, so you can imagine my delight and surprise at having some material actually available on the big ol' website. So enjoy...

I've Celine that face before.

So, an excerpt from my exigesis on last week's Celine Dion show got used in the Nashville Scene in their "The Spin" music gossip column, and you can read it here.



But there's more fun to be had on that front, y'all. Without further ado, here's my unedited thoughts on l'Affaire Dion.

Dion and on.

You know that feeling, that “I’m gonna sit in this car outside of this son of a bitch’s house with this bottle of Boone’s Farm until he realizes that we’re meant to be together” feeling? Well, Céline Dion does too, and even the most die-hard ironist had to bow down before the ‘wake up and love me’ passionate desperation of “To Love You More,” the 1996 sometime hit that she used to close the ‘Here’s the Hits’ opening portion of her show at the Sommet Center. We wanted some diva moments, and Canada’s most endearing export since Edith Prickley delivered in full.

Never anything less than completely committed to the songs, which she nurtures to maturity using melisma and Intellabeams, she nonetheless spends her between-song patter as a goofy spaz who loves nothing more than making silly faces or sincerely asking the audience’s permission to perform songs that people’d gleefully shelled out dollars to hear in the first place. If she weren’t so completely genuine, it would seem like Gena Rowlands-in-Opening Night madness, and yet you come away from the Taking Chances tour with the kind of respect normally afforded to civil engineers or a really adventurous chef.

Her commitment, especially during the ‘didn’t see that coming’ James Brown medley, her fits of floor-writhing ecstasy during her Andrea Bocelli duet “The Prayer,” and during a fierce barrel through her 1995 Francophone career-definer “Pour Que Tu M’Aimes Encore,” is unquestionable. It’s weird, though, how so many of her songs could be seen as other artists’. She’s had a gift for much of her career for taking others’ almost-theres and minor hits and making them into something major and epic.

“The Power of Love,” written and initially recorded by Jennifer Rush but then also a big pop hit for Laura Branigan, is now Celine’s. Her Jim Steinman collaboration was originally a minor UK flash for the producer’s attempted girl group Pandora’s Box. Tonight’s show opened with “I Drove All Night,” which was recorded by both Roy Orbison and (definitvely) Cyndi Lauper. And we also got a cover of Heart’s “Alone.” Similarly, we had Eric Carmen’s “All By Myself” and a take on the Phil Spector/Tina Turner classic “River Deep, Mountain High.” That Dion is not a songwriter (often) is not up for a debate. But it’s fascinating that she takes the same approach to pop music as her fans do, finding the songs that speak to her and giving them voice as she sees it.

What she excels at are songs where there is some distancing factor; not to say some form of irony or dramatic device, but more where she incarnates a character in the song who is at a remove from song’s object. Perhaps a remembrance, a crippling regret, a dramatic shift between indicative and subjunctive tenses; these are the hallmarks of the truly exceptional Dion offering.

She shines as the outsider, whether as the shunted one who wants “To Love You More,” or the narratrix of the so-devastating-they-couldn’t-even-translate-it-into-English/’What would Bible Belt America think of this” “Le Fils du Superman,” or, in the shimmering, 60s girl-group coulda been “I Love You,” from 1996, where the subject and object of the song’s profound love don’t even get to speak to one another directly until the bridge.

And then, of course, there’s that Titanic song. And that’s the key to Céline Dion. You can’t approach her or her songs ironically (Oh, if only she’d recorded a theme song for Revolutionary Road…). That’s why The Mattoid’s cover of “My Heart Will Go On” seems like such a great idea in the abstract, then just becomes painful in the concrete. You have to give props to a woman who ties herself to the vicissitudes of pop music without hesitation. At times, that means feeling a bit like you’re at a show in Blanche and Baby Jane’s living room, but it’s unquestionably worth it.

Why does the heart go on? It’s a grammatically awkward and lyrically inconclusive song, and there’s not a single other big ticket diva who could tackle it and make it work. It’s not in their personae as singers to allow that much uncertainty into their work, and Dion thrives on precisely that.

When you listen to “Pour que Tu m’Aimes Encore,” or even its English version “If That’s What It Takes,” there’s an almost submissive streak in the lyrics, and that’s what allows her voice to thrive. Divas by the dozens use their voice to let you know who calls the shots, and Dion, with just an occasional shift in phrasing, says that’s not always the case. It’s why the only enduring ballad that Mariah Carey has ever recorded is “I Don’t Wanna Cry,” where she uses her silky (and hence almost completely unused) lower register for the first two thirds of the song. There’s a dangerous sincerity there that practically defines Céline Dion’s best work.

She has the rigid and fierce articulation of a drag queen, which is meant as a complement. Gestures carry a lot of meaning across, especially when dealing with as polyglot a fanbase as Dion’s. I’d love to see one of her shows in France, or Belgium, or Québec; it’s no secret I adore her Francophone material, and her whole policy of only performing one song in French at U.S. shows I find somewhat of a shortchanging. The glittery black bell bottoms, the toreador dancers, the extended Chrysler dancer remix that opens the show, even the ceaseless thanking of the audience. You feel like that’s just how she is, and she’d be doing it even if millions of people worldwide weren’t there to see it.

That joy and that drive, that’s rarer than unicorns or decent Vandy parking. Sincerity, even strapped to the hood of a Jim Steinman roadster like “It’s All Coming Back To Me Now,” punches through even the thickest of Lithium and Zoloft hazes, and it’s no surprise that the near twenty thousand faces filing out after the show were moved. I went with two pregnant women and an angel-faced vixen whose name was, in fact, Love, and we felt it for the rest of the night, the four of us.

"We're going to need a special locker for the hat."

Bow to Re-Re's hat. I mean, it really is something almost magical.

At the movies: My Bloody Valentine 3D.

Call it another example of Polar Express syndrome. That film, viewed simply and in two dimensions, is borderline unwatchable. In 3D, it’s worth seeing if just for its use of physical space and imaginative sense of movement. Most films are improved by the addition of that extra dimension, even if it only makes a passable film into something interesting. As a regular, two-dimensional offering, My Bloody Valentine is yet another remake of an 80s semi-classic (and while countless reviews of this new version refer to the 1981 original as being minor, poorly-made, and even badly-shot, don’t you believe it for a second- there’s a grace of camera to that version that few slashers could touch) that, while light years ahead of messes like the remakes of The Fog, Prom Night, and April Fool’s Day, still doesn’t understand what its originator did right.

It’s got one big, movie-derailing problem that is handled dishonestly and in as stupidly Scooby-Doo a fashion as possible, and the three leads all seem way too young to be dealing with the ‘real life’ issues of their characters. That said, My Bloody Valentine 3D is an absolute joy. Stepping up and giving the audience real fear, fake blood, and a pickaxe-wielding psycho with some unresolved issues, this film is gloriously stupid and filled with the violence, nudity, sex, and pokey-things-which-actually-do-damage that 3D cinema has been needing. This movie opens with three consecutive massacres, and that’s just the first ten or so minutes. It has none of the subtlety, subtext, or gorgeous camerawork of its progenitor, but it delivers the kind of unironic jolts that horror movie fans and thrillseekers have been needing for what seems like decades.

At the movies: Defiance.

After the 1941 Nazi invasion of Byelorussia results in the deaths and deportations of over fifty thousand people, the brothers Tuvia (Daniel Craig), Zus (Liev Schreiber), and Asael (Jamie Bell) Bielski must evade death squads and capture in the forests they have spent their whole lives learning and living in. Over time, they provide a refuge for Jews escaping the SS death machine, finding their own place and community in the process.

Daniel Craig, refining his Munich credentials and helping drive a Jews-with-guns film, again takes that little-used cinematic archetype and makes it his own. Similarly, here’s a WWII film that tells a different story than what we as audiences and observers of history are used to, and director Edward Zwick (Glory, Legends of the Fall) is allowed to make another little-told tale of war come alive.

Zwick follows his Glory template here, and it still works. It seems disrespectful to ask for a bit more leavening humor (the line “we’re accountants” is dark humor at its finest), but touches like that allow more life into what, at times, feels a bit bound. The three brothers are each fascinating personae, and each of the lead actors comes at things from a different place; I find Bell’s Asael’s arc to be the most wrenching, but there’s nothing to stop viewers from finding their own way inside the film. Like the Bielskis' community, there are many different ways of achieving a similar goal.

At the movies: The Wrestler.

Randy "The Ram" Robinson (Mickey Rourke) was one of the biggest names in Professional Wrestling during its late-80s heyday. But the intervening decades have been hard on The Ram, now reduced to autograph shows, ritualized bloodletting at small venues, and doing time behind a deli counter. Going nowhere slowly, with an estranged daughter and a nebulous relationship with exotic dancer Cassidy (Marisa Tomei), The Ram is feeling the hurt- of life.

Deafening praise has followed Mickey Rourke's staggering acheivement in this film since its premiere at the 2008 Venice Film Festival, and that's only increased with his Best Actor win at the Golden Globes last week. Comeback of the Year, people have been saying, and they're pretty much right: Rourke is vaulting out of his time spent in direct-to-video efforts and cashing empty paychecks with this heart-filled tale of redemption and violence.

Everything you've heard is true. Rourke is dynamite, inhabiting the wounded skin of Randy Robinson like someone who has been equally beaten down by life. Tomei is just as good, and director Darren Aronofsky has rebounded from his catastrophic 2006 The Fountain with his most engaging and accessible film. The script could have been
a movie of the week in the wrong hands, and Rourke and crew elevate it into a transcendentalist masterpiece of physical memory.

At the movies: Che.

Part One gives revolutionary Ernesto "Che" Guevara the cinemascope biopic treatment, tracking the Cuban revolution he and Fidel Castro engineered against the government of Fulgencio Batista. Part Two, a more intimate and raw affair, explores Guevara's abortive Bolivian campaign.

Together, they allow director Steven Soderbergh to turn his scientific eye on the methodologies of a movement, and the end result is as hypnotic and weird a history lesson as one could hope for.

Benicio del Toro won the Best Actor at 2008's Cannes Film Festival with his portrayal of Che, even as countless ink was spilled about how uncommercial and odd the undertaking was (two films totalling four and a quarter hours, dealing with a controversial public figure, in a language other than English). But now, several months later, following remarkable success in its December Academy Award-qualifying run, Che becomes even more an object of mystery and surprise acclaim and appeal.

There's a certain ambivalence to Soderbergh's directorial eye, and it oddly makes him the perfect man for the story of Ernesto Guevara. Part One's procedural approach to building a political movement hits all the big ticket beats, with tanks and triumphant speechery, but Part Two's handheld detailing of the collapse of Che's movement is where all the good stuff is. It's got that weird 'going crazy, besieged in the jungle' feel of Apichatpong Weerasethakul's Tropical Malady, and with an exquisite supporting performance from Run Lola Run and The Bourne Identity's Franka Potente.