Remembering Jazz Saxophonist Frank Morgan

DATE December 18, 2007 ACCOUNT NUMBER N/A
TIME 12:00 Noon-1:00 PM AUDIENCE N/A
NETWORK NPR
PROGRAM Fresh Air

Filler: By policy of WHYY, this information is restricted and has
been omitted from this transcript

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Interview: Film critic David Edelstein's top 11 movies of 2007
TERRY GROSS, host:

This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross.

So what were your favorite movies this year? You might want to compare your
list with the top 10 list our film critic David Edelstein has brought with
him.

Hi, David. Well, let's start with the 10 best list. Why don't you just,
like, read us through the list and then we'll talk about some of your entries
on it and some of the movies that didn't make it, and why.

Mr. DAVID EDELSTEIN: Well, Terry, other critics have 10 best lists. Mine
goes to 11 because it's one louder, isn't it?

GROSS: Sure.

Mr. EDELSTEIN: And so here are my 11 films. One of them is a tie. "The
Diving Bell and the Butterfly" was my favorite film of the year, followed very
closely by "Away From Her"; "There Will Be Blood"; "Sweeney Todd"; "The
Savages"; "No Country for Old Men"; "No End in Sight"--the documentary;
"Michael Clayton"; here's my tie and it's very clever because they're both
animated, "Ratatouille" and "Persepolis," they're animated but they're nothing
alike; and finally a small film that is just opened in some markets, called
"Grace Is Gone."

GROSS: OK. So the number one on the list is "The Diving Bell and the
Butterfly," which is Julian Schnabel's film about a man who becomes paralyzed
and communicates by--what?--blinking one eye?

Mr. EDELSTEIN: Yes. One eye, I believe he can see through, but there's a
danger that it's going to fill up with some pus-like substance and cause
various amputations. So they sew it shut. One of the most interesting shots
in the film is of that eye being sewn shut from the point of view of the eye.

GROSS: You know, I have to say, it sounds like--it has to be among the more
depressing films ever made, but you say it's not.

Mr. EDELSTEIN: Well, no. Because while it's going on, you hear the voice of
the narrator, Jean-Dominque Bauby. The thing is, he's had this massive
stroke. He has something now called locked-in syndrome. His mind is fully
functional. If anything, it seems to be hyperactive, and yet his body, all he
can do is blink one eye. So there's this enormous disconnect between the body
and the mind. So one of the clever things about the film is that we hear his
voice, and his voice is lucid and funny and sexy, and it's a total shock when
a third of the way into the movie we see what he actually looks like. And
what he looks like is, as he says, something out of a jar of formaldehyde.

And so you--the fact that he's talking the whole time, that he's making fun of
his doctors, or that he's lusting after his therapists, you know, it gives the
film a much different quality than your normal illness of the week movie.

GROSS: Now, "Sweeney Todd" is number four on your list. And this is the
adaptation of the absolutely brilliant, truly wonderful Stephen Sondheim
musical. It is directed by Tim Burton and it stars Johnny Depp and Helena
Bonham Carter, both of whom really aren't singers. And this is probably the
most challenging--like, musically challenging Broadway musical ever written.

Mr. EDELSTEIN: Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, hang on. I have to disagree
with you right there. I mean, the most music--this is not "Carousel." You
know? I mean, sometimes you need real operatic voices. The fact is that--did
you see the Michael Cerveris production on Broadway?

GROSS: Yes.

Mr. EDELSTEIN: That great production. Well, Cerveris has a big voice. It's
huge, but I wouldn't say that it's beautiful. I mean, I think it can
handle--I think "Sweeney Todd" can handle all kinds of voices. What it's
never had before, in the three times I've seen it on stage in its various
Broadway incarnations, is actors who have absolutely nothing in the way of
pipes. I mean, there's nothing--there's no air. You know, when Johnny Depp
is trying to sing about vengeance, he has no air behind it. It's one of those
head voices. You know, when you hear somebody whose voice is all in their
head? You know, sometimes he'll--when he has to sing out, he does that sort
of Anthony Newley thing. You know:

(Singing) What kind of fool of I?

(Spoken) You know? That kind--sorry about that. That sounds worse than he
does. But, you know, it's right up there in the head. It doesn't--there's no
diaphragm behind it. And so, yeah, that takes a lot of getting used to. But!
But, but, but, the movie is great anyway because Burton factors this in and he
creates enormous intimacy to the point where most of the time you wouldn't
want actors who really sing out, who really, you know, give voices that you
could hear, you know, from the third balcony because the camera is so close
and because what they're doing is so internal.

Johnny Depp gives a very internalized performance. I mean, he looks a fright.
He has this sort of streak of white in his hair, like Humphrey Bogart had in
this old vampire movie that he--"The Return of Dr. X." And he's very silly
looking, but he's very, very intense. And Burton actually manages to make
Helena Bonham Carter's character kind of sexy in her ghoulish way.

GROSS: Now, two of the movies on your top 10 list have to do with Iraq. One
is the documentary "No End in Sight" about how we got into Iraq. And the
other is "Grace Is Gone," which stars John Cusack as a father whose wife is in
the military and gets killed in Iraq, and he's left with having to tell the
children and carry on without their mother. There's been several other movies
about Iraq that came out this year...

Mr. EDELSTEIN: Mm, yes.

GROSS: ...the documentaries and feature films. You want to talk a little bit
about how Iraq has been playing in the movies and how those movies have been
playing with audiences.

Mr. EDELSTEIN: "A Mighty Heart," "Redemption," "In the Valley of Elah,"
"Lions for Lambs," "Redacted," and they all bombed. They all bombed. And
none of them was particularly good. The fact is that Hollywood has never been
particularly responsible to national crises. I mean, not since the '60s,
which was a very different culture. And I think it was an extraordinary thing
that these movies came out this year, that actually Hollywood--or in the case
of "Redacted," Mark Cuban at HDNet--was willing to put money behind these
things because there wasn't a very good chance they would do well. They
didn't do well. They tended to be very crudely melodramatic or didactic.

As for the two movies that I mentioned, "No End in Sight" is a documentary.
It is a documentary, though not from a kind of Michael Moore liberal
tub-thumping perspective, but from the perspective of a policy wonk. Charlie
Ferguson, who actually studied day by day what went wrong, the decisions. Of
course, the key decision being to essentially disband the entire Iraqi army,
thereby, you know, liberating all these people who now had these enormous
chips on their soldiers and access to weapons. And it just looks at that
decision by decision by decisions. And in the end you just--your head is
swimming. You just can't believe how so many wrong turns were made, whatever
your politics, whatever you think of, you know, the initial rationale for
evading Iraq.

Now, "Grace Is Gone" looks at it merely from the home front and from the
perspective of a guy who was in the military, who had to leave the military
because of his eyesight, whose wife stayed in the military, whose wife dies
and he has to break the news to his two daughters, and he can't do it. And
the movie is about his denial, but it's a very loving denial. I don't know, I
came out of there feeling like I, you know, I needed to be wheeled out of that
movie.

GROSS: My guest is FRESH AIR's film critic David Edelstein, who's also film
critic for New York Magazine. We're going through some of his best films of
the year and looking at the year in movies.

And we should say that some of the movies on your 10 best list haven't opened
in most of the country. So if you're hearing a movie that is unfamiliar to
you, it's probably because it hasn't opened in your neighborhood yet. But,
you know, a lot of these movies open first in New York and LA, particularly
this time of year, for Academy Award consideration.

Mr. EDELSTEIN: Yeah. Everything is dominated by--that's why your head will
swim if you open the pages of The New York Times Arts & Leisure section or
something and you see all the movies opening. You think, `How could anybody,
you know, see all of these movies.' But, in fact, they're only opening to
qualify and to be in the heads of critics and academy voters.

GROSS: So some of us will have to wait for January to see some of the movies
that are on your 10 best list?

Mr. EDELSTEIN: That's correct. That's correct. Although some of them are,
you know, "Away from Her" is already on DVD.

GROSS: Mm-hmm.

Mr. EDELSTEIN: "There Will Be Blood" and "Sweeney Todd" open on the 21st.
"The Savages" is open in most of the country. "No Country for Old Men," the
Coen brothers film, is open in most of the country. And that, by the way, has
been sweeping a lot of the critics' prizes, surprisingly.

GROSS: Surprising to me.

Mr. EDELSTEIN: Well, it's not a crowd pleaser. It's a very, very bleak
and--a bleak film. It might be the ultimate nihilist statement in modern
cinema insofar as it ends on a note of complete and utter resignation.

GROSS: Is it just me, but somehow the movie seems a little on the surface to
me, that it seems to degenerate into a chase film with an occasional
existential voiceover by Tommy Lee Jones?

Mr. EDELSTEIN: Well, it is a chase film, and I think it's a very exciting
chase film. It's at the end, when the chase all of a sudden stops and the
detective--the sheriff leaves the field and says, `Oh, well, evil exists.
Nothing you can do about it. Let's go home and pull the cover over our head.'
That's when I think a lot of people are brought up short. But that, of
course, is very true to Cormac McCarthy's vision. My problems are more with
Cormac McCarthy's vision than with the film that the Coens have made of it.

GROSS: David, when you look at your 10 best--or I should say 11 best--list,
do you see any patterns emerging in the year?

Mr. EDELSTEIN: I see sub-patterns. I see little sub-themes emerging. On
"Away from Her," "The Savages" and "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly," all
deal with extremely incapacitated people. One of them has Alzheimer's. One
of them is the parent of the Savage children, who has growing dementia. The
other obviously has this massive stroke. And I do think it reflects a lot of
our concern, a lot of our anxiety about this mind/body disjunction. As heath
care improves, as the technology improves and people's minds move further
apart from their bodies, I think that there's this enormous anxiety, both
about our parents and what we can do about them when their physical entity
remains but their minds are somewhere else, and what's going to happen to us
in the future when presumably technology will even be more advanced.

GROSS: Any other patterns you see on the 10 best list?

Mr. EDELSTEIN: A lot of blood.

GROSS: Mm-hmm.

Mr. EDELSTEIN: And a lot of really grim material, and a lot of unhappy
endings. I think that there is a kind of a miasma in this country right now
that is really reflected not just in our independent cinema but in our
commercial cinema. Probably more protagonists die in movies this year than
any time since the days of "Easy Rider" when, you know, it was really
fashionable for the hero to get blown off his bicycle at the end. And I don't
know if audiences like it better, but I have seen growing derision for fake
happy endings. I feel like audiences have become--maybe they don't want to
see the heroes die. Maybe that makes them very sad, but at the same time
they're savvy enough now to see that oftentimes a story needs to end with the
hero's sacrifice.

GROSS: Are there movies this year that you think your critic colleagues
overpraised and you're in a minority on?

Mr. EDELSTEIN: Oh, yes. But they're movies that you admire for trying to do
things that other movies never dare to do. I'm not in love with either "I'm
Not There" or "Juno." "Juno" is a real critics' darling at the moment and, of
course, it will make a great star and deservedly so, of the young Canadian
actress Ellen Page. I found the movie show-offy and fake. I found Juno
herself about as real as one of those giant flying robots in "Transformers."
There's a great idea at the core. It's about a girl who's grown up too fast,
and in the course of the film she connects with a 30-something guy who's
trying to stay young, and that screws up his marriage and it makes her realize
that she has to grow up and take more responsibility. And that part is really
interesting and affecting. I just found the movie such a hustle in the use of
pop songs, in the use of pop culture references, in the use of almost insanely
hyperbolic, clever dialogue. Everybody talked the same, as in really bad Neil
Simon. But of course, a lot of people have looked beyond that and are very,
very moved and enchanted by the film.

The other one, of course, is "I'm Not There," Todd Haynes' film which splits
Bob Dylan into all these different personae, I think seven different ones.
And it tries to say that the secret of his greatness is a kind of what Keats
called negative capability, an ability to transcend the self or to change the
self. But scene by scene, the movie isn't very surprising, except for Cate
Blanchett, who sort of plays Dylan as Chuck Barris. That's an amusing stunt.
But if you've seen the D.A. Pennebaker documentary "Don't Look Back," you've
seen it all before.

GROSS: What were some of your biggest disappointments this year? Maybe the
two films you just talked about, "Juno" and "I'm Not There," fit that
description, but are there movies that you were really looking forward to and
then felt let down when you saw them?

Mr. EDELSTEIN: I guess I was a little disappointed that "Redacted"
caricatured the personalities of the soldiers who committed this atrocity. I
felt like DePalma did not have enough of a sympathetic rapport with those
characters so that we could look at them and say, `That could be me there.'
That failure of empathy, I think, really cost the movie.

As for--I was very excited about "The Golden Compass," which I thought was
going to be a more sophisticated, more enlightened "Lord of the Rings," based
on having read the books of Philip Pullman. And it's a disaster. It's really
crummy. The first act is bewildering and boring. And because it's not
properly set up, the picture that follows has absolutely no oomph. You don't
know what the relationship is of people and their demons. It takes a long
time to explain. And so when you get to acts two and three, forget about it.
It's chaos. It's so badly staged. And, of course, you have these
fundamentalist critics saying, `Well, see, this just proves that, you know, if
you write a sort of anti-Christian allegory'--which, by the way, this is
not--`you are not going to have an audience in this country.' Well, you're not
going to have an audience in this country because you made a really crummy
movie.

GROSS: Well, that reminds me, how much do you think the culture wars were
played out in the movie theaters this year?

Mr. EDELSTEIN: The culture war didn't play out in a lot of movies because
people didn't see a lot of the movies in which they would have played out. I
think where you most saw an impact was in the area of abortion. "Knocked Up,"
for example, was a movie about a woman and a man who are wildly unsuitable who
have a one night stand. Neither one of them is in a position to have a child,
to support a child, to create a stable family environment for a child. And
yet the heroine decides to go ahead and have the baby and gives
extremely--what many people saw as short shrift to the idea of terminating the
pregnancy.

And that's the same thing that happens in "Juno." And if you see "Lake of
Fire," the Tony Kaye documentary that documents the abortion movement, well,
Tony Kaye says that he's being neutral in the film but he does show you an
entire abortion from beginning to end. And simply by putting the abortion
clinics into the movies, simply by showing these graphic images in the films,
I think many of them are able to create, you know, enormously powerful
statements about why one should not terminate a pregnancy.

GROSS: Do you think that "Juno" and "Knocked Up" are making anti-abortion
statements? Or do you think they're just comic premises for movies? Or not
so comic but, you know, premises for movies.

Mr. EDELSTEIN: I think that anything you do in a film is going to have
political ramifications. I think the decision of the character in "Knocked
Up" to bear the child is inexplicable. Now, that's completely independent of
whatever I think about abortion. I'm saying that on its own terms, the
decision is ludicrous, and it's made more so by Judd Apatow, the
writer/director. He simply throws in every possible reason why this woman
should not bear a child. He makes the case extremely efficiently, and then he
wipes it out with her ringing assertion that she's going to bear the child no
matter what. That's a political statement. Whether you agree with it or not,
it's a political statement.

GROSS: What are some of your favorite performances of the year?

Mr. EDELSTEIN: There were so many amazing performances this year. I'm
delighted that Frank Langella has finally gotten the spotlight. In the small
film "Starting Out in the Evening," he plays an aging white novelist, kind of
a Saul Bellow figure, but neglected. And he's at work on a new book, and a
graduate student played by Lauren Ambrose comes to do a dissertation on him
and possibly to seduce him. And he's such a big, sad, hulking figure. He
gives a very immobile performance. It's all in his eyes and in that deep
voice. And he's lived for so long below the surface of his life that you're
afraid what happens if this girl actually does seduce him and bring him to the
surface, and whether or not he has the strength to handle it, either
physically or emotionally. It's a stunning performance by a man who, I think,
we've overlooked for many years. I mean, certainly since his "Dracula" was
the last time he got any attention. And he was fantastic as William Paley in
"Good Night and Good Luck" and in "Frost/Nixon," which is soon to be a movie.

GROSS: I want to throw in a couple of good words for two performances this
year. One is Viggo Mortensen in "Eastern Promises." I thought he was just
really terrific in that. And Casey Affleck was awfully good in "Gone, Baby,
Gone," which is on your extended list of the best films of the year. And he
was also really good in "The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert
Ford." I hope I got that right; it's such a long title.

Mr. EDELSTEIN: I think you did. It was a lovely performance, too.

The best thing about Viggo Mortensen as an actor is that he can maintain this
sort of very amused surface and signal that there's all kinds of things going
on in his head. You'll never really get to the bottom of it. He's a great
person to cast as a character who you're not sure is a good guy or a bad guy.

GROSS: David, how is the TV writers strike affecting the movie world?

Mr. EDELSTEIN: Well, I think it's going to affect the television world much
more because the studios have been stockpiling scripts so that there's no
shortage of scripts to make. Where it comes up in Hollywood is if a script
needs works and it's not ready to go before the camera, or an actor says, `I
can't do that right now. It needs a rewrite.' And are you going to be able to
entice someone for enough money to cross the picket line or to do it in
secret. I know that that has happened in the past, I know. I hope it doesn't
happen here. There is a film right now called "State of Play," which is based
on a wonderful BBC miniseries that is being remade here. I know that Brad
Pitt left the cast because he wasn't satisfied with the part he was playing.
Russell Crowe stepped in. I think the flimmakers got a good deal in that
particular regard. But the question is, are they going to go ahead and shoot
if the original writer can't do a rewrite or can't hire one of these
fabulously expensive rewrite people to do it.

GROSS: So is the problem that the original writer is in the guild that's
striking?

Mr. EDELSTEIN: That's correct. That's correct. Now, I had a friend...

GROSS: So there's a lot of people who do both, they write for television and
they write for movies, and if they're guild is striking they can't write for
movies, even though...

Mr. EDELSTEIN: Oh, it's the TV--the TV writers and the film writers are in
this together. Both of them stand to lose massive amounts of money once the
business shifts to direct downloading and moves to the Internet. I had a
friend, who I won't name, who wrote a blockbuster and was asked to rewrite it
during the last writers strike. He chose not to do it. Someone from England
came in and did it very, very hush, hush. And he's bitter about it to this
day. And I don't blame him. The script is weaker for it.

GROSS: So the TV writers and the screenwriters are in the same guild, but I
thought it was just the TV writers who are on strike.

Mr. EDELSTEIN: No, no. It's the film writers, too.

GROSS: Oh, you know, I didn't really understand that. So this means like all
screenplays are basically on hold right now?

Mr. EDELSTEIN: Well, as I said, the studios were stockpiling. I mean,
television stockpiled a lot of scripts, too. I mean, I know TV writers who,
you know, spent a long time, spent many sleepless nights trying to get their
scripts done before the inevitable strike came. But, yes, it's much easier
when you have a film script than it is when you have--when you have an ongoing
and endlessly demanding television series.

GROSS: Well, if you--one more question for you, David. If you were to
recommend one movie for people to see over the holidays, and a movie that will
have opened widely by Christmas, what would it be?

Mr. EDELSTEIN: I would say go see "Sweeney Todd," but be prepared for a lot
of arterial spray. Great music, great photography, great performances,
amazing arterial spray of all sorts. You've never seen anything like this
blood on a essentially black, white, charcoal canvas. It just leaps out of
the screen. It's so audacious. You know that Tim Burton is just cackling.
And at the same time, you're swooning because the music is so beautiful.

GROSS: Well, David, I want to wish you a happy holidays. Thank you a lot for
talking with us.

Mr. EDELSTEIN: And to you, Terry. Thank you.

GROSS: David Edelstein is the film critic for FRESH AIR and New York
Magazine. You can find his list of the best films of the year on our Web
site, freshair.npr.org, where you can also download podcasts of our show.
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