Delirious with DiCillo

In his films, director Tom DiCillo typically paints some aspect of show business with plenty of spit and vinegar and a surprising wallop of sentimentality. Delirious, his treatise on the fame machine, is no exception. It reunites the writer/director with Steve Buscemi, who clocks in arguably the most undersung performance of his career, as Les, a bitterer-than-thou celeb photographer who hires homeless Toby (bumpy-mouthed Michael Pitt) to be essentially an indentured servant. (Yes, they call those interns in New York.) Toby hankers after poor-little-rich-girl Karma, a Britney-like starlet (Alison Lohman) whose parents are suing her for $7 million to recover the costs of raising her, who launches her own fragrance Instant K’Harma (yes, sic) and who writes her own songs clad only in a bra and horn-rimmed glasses. What’s more, she is strangely sympathetic, partly because of how she’s been written and partly in credit to Lohman. Eventually, Toby's pout snags Alison's attention and a moral struggle with Les ensues that involves a meta-scripted reality series in which Toby plays Toby, the homeless serial killler. To say DiCillo has keenly observed this industry in this well-edited film is an understatement, and I know of what I speak these days.

This is probably why Kohn included me in the discussion with DiCillo that followed the film. I was genuinely curious about DiCillo's juxtaposition of an idealized romantic love (one scene between Pitt and Lohman is literally strewn with flowers if not hearts) with an otherwise prevailing bitterness. It's a tonal contrast that sometimes disrupts the narrative flow of all his films in a way I've never been able to reconcile.

In person, DiCillo oddly resembles Buscemi’s character; they both sport rather long shanks of dark hair and a ‘90s version of a '70s aesthetic. Was DiCillo conscious of that choice? Was he mocking himself in some way? Forgive my superficial observations but I am always fascinated by how people choose to present themselves. (To be fair, I should disclose I am wearing bright red lipstick and a tiger print jacket over a red 60s print dress with gold platform clogs. “Color!” mouthed a slightly cowed DiCillo before we strode on stage.)

Affter outlining his very frustrating, largely unsuccessful struggle to achieve distribution (he used the word “astonishing” a lot), DiCillo fielded my question with aplomb. “I believe in real love,” he said. “And we rarely see it on the screen. The reason that the relationship between Toby and Karma works is because they possess a purity. They are honest, which is necessary for love to happen.” It was such an unabashed thing to say that I almost felt embarrassed for him, except that it was true and it was clear that DiCillo wasn’t just tossing out a line. His voice broke and I felt, not for the first time at this year’s festival, dangerously close to crying in public myself.

In Which the Author Takes a Roofy

Yesterday began in a pink and gold haze. Ebertfest director Nate Kohn humored my epic crush and sat me next to Rufus Sewell on a panel in which some other filmmakers, actors, and writers who are not Rufus also participated. Rufus muttered two very, very amusing jokes under his breath, poured water in his glass, and commented upon what I wrote in my notepad. He studied his iPhone surreptitiously. He scratched his nose twice and generously laughed at three of my own jokes. He then fondled the soap bubbles inexplicably placed in front of all the panelists. He nibbled at not one but two chocolate cookies. Significantly less of note: the death knoll for American attention spans was rung; the merits of bothering to watch film on small screens were debated; filmmakers bemoaned their decades-long, soul-breaking quests for budgets and distribution. Rufus disclosed in a breathtaking moment that he had recently opted to work in theater rather than film. He then raised his eyebrows when I named the gossip publication where I toil and I pointed out that an Arabian Nights stint was not exactly Shakespeare. We then made up and rode into the sunset ever so awesomely.

Actually, the panel — which also included Tom DiCillo (Delirious), film critic Roger Roeper, Timothy Spall, Joseph Greco (Canvas), Jeff Nichols (Shotgun Stories), Eran Kolirin (The Band's Visit), Bill Forsyth (Housekeeping), and producer Adam Hammel (Canvas) — proved lively and well-moderated by Kohn, if he could just learn to speak a little less emphatically. The dude puts the B in subtle.

Is It My Bad Energy?

I apologize for my even more glacial-than-normal posting rate. In an unexpected and most unwelcome turn of events, my Macbook battery has died, which is making all kinds of computer activity (like using it) uber laborious. If anyone wants to hook me up with a battery I’d be much indebted because I don’t really have time to scavenge for one right now. So pinned to an outlet I write before jumping to a Shotgun Stories screening. Apparently losing my juice renders my grammar Yoda-like. Just so you know.

Sewell and Spall in the Land of Dreamy Dreams

Here’s what I forgot: Kenneth Branagh’s Hamlet (1996) is about a million years long. And by a million years, I do respectfully mean 238 minutes of rawther unadorned Shakespeare. In the press notes, Ebert describes it as the first uncut film version of the bard’s “most challenging” tragedy. If I were writing elsewhere, I might wrench that quote out of context for my own nefarious purposes, but in the interest of fairness I must acknowledge Roger goes on to say many complimentary things.

Whereas I will say that the film requires an intermission, which in my allegedly humble opinion should only be required by Reds and Gone With the Wind. Suffice to say at 11:30 I cruised to the theater and still managed to catch the last 20 minutes or so — admittedly grand enough to make me wish I’d had the chance to revise my opinion after all. Afterward, actors Rufus Sewell and Timothy Spall spoke, both as charming and bright as you’d expect and smart in pinstriped trousers and boots. Why can’t American men take a page from those Brits? And yes, Rufus proves eminently crushworthy. A laundrylist of why before it leaks elsewhere, Tourettes-style.

1.He is as handsome in real life as he is stretched across a big screen. A rarity, I doth assure you. This includes: a. bedroom eyes b. long lashes not wasted on this boy c. a head proportionate to his body.
2. He laughs all the time, sometimes at his own jokes. Admittedly this quality might endear himself less to me were he less handsome or if he’d laughed less at my own high comedy, but who’s going to live their life on a conditional? Not I, says this frog.
3. He speaks in the straining, raspy voice of an earnest nine-year-old.

Okay, Sewell PSA officially over.

Both Spall and Sewell extolled the virtues of working in a production in which no part, uh, bit. “It was about the language this way,” Spall said. This surely shed new light on the tremendous “supporting” cast (everyone from Billy Crystal to Charlton Heston to Jack Lemmon) that I’d previously dismissed as distracting.

The two shared background on the production, from how the terrific snow scene was achieved (apparently a company called Snow Business actually exists!) to the coach who wrote Shakespearean-like dialogue for the extras to mutter at each other. (I want those lines! How they would spice up my subway rides: A pox on your house, o he who spreads his legs so wide I can't sit down.)

As the Q and As often go here, the conversation took an unexpected if welcome turn. Spall reminisced about his long professional and personal alliance with English director Mike Leigh. “He and I share a love of showing what’s extraordinary in the ordinary,” he said. “The delivery man in a Hollywood movie—that’s the main character in the Leigh movie.”

Feels Like Starting Over

Greetings once again from Champaign, where this broad has finally landed after a long, less-than-glamorous trek from jolly old Brooklyn. I swear every time I take that baby (American) Eagle (jet) from Chicago to the local airport here, I can’t help flashing on the likes of Buddy Holly, the Big Bopper, Patsy Cline, Otis o Otis. Although I'm still a relative newbie in the Ebertfest family — and rest assured that it is a family — it hit me tonight that this is my fourth year at the Festival. Enough time for a lot of changes to have taken place.

The biggest disturbance in the force, as they say, was the death in January of Dusty Cohl, the co-founder of the Toronto International Film Festival, this festival’s “accomplice-in-chief,” and an all-around lion-hearted troublemaker. I have never been one for a daddy complex — my complicated relationship with my own old man always having precluded such folly — but I have to admit I always secretly wished Dusty were my pop. He never missed a beat; he was the original tough Jew; and his shrewdness never outstripped his enormous, far-reaching kindness. He was one of the few people whose good opinion I actively campaigned for, and when he solemnly pinned one of his legendary silver cowboy hats on my lapel, I nearly plotzed. When I first saw him again last year, his big embrace — all whiskey and cigars and chutzpah — broke down any remaining New York reserve that had survived my flight. For a guy whose shtick was gruffness, he could give a mean hug. It was rivaled only by his wink — the best wink I’ve ever witnessed. I still practice it all the time.

The airport was nearly empty upon my arrival this year, and the contrast to last year’s hustle and bustle hit me hard before I could bolster myself. I thought of Dusty, and of how Roger, still fighting the good fight with the after-effects of his cancer, won’t be able to make it. I thought of all the people I had lost in my own life in this last year.

But then just when I was sliding into an inexcusable malaise, my friend Chris, who’s been squiring me around these last three years, strode in sporting that grin as big as the Midwestern skies. “What movies are we gonna see?” he said, and grabbed my Canal Street-cheap suitcase. Before I knew it I had launched into a happy laundry-list. Because, well, it’s the movies, stupid. It’s always the movies — selected by Roger, screened on the gorgeous, old-timey screen of the Virginia Theater, and discussed ad nauseum afterward.

I’m ecstatic to ogle The Cell and Hulk and Romance & Cigarettes (Turturro’s fabulously unironic but still tongue-in-cheek working-class musical) on a big screen; to finally learn why Shotgun Stories has set tongues a-flapping; to surrender to the silent film Underworld’s squalid pleasures, and to revisit such worthy films as Housekeeping. And I happily anticipate some conversions: to be convinced that some of the other films (that shall remain nameless here) are worthier than I remember them. Roger has a knack of banishing the cinennui of even the most jaunidiced film viewers. Even from afar, I know he will achieve that again this year.

And with that, I’m off to find the gang. I may have missed the first film (Hamlet) but there’s still Steak N Shake, I’m sure. Here’s to the strawberry-banana malted.