Mick Innes as ‘John’ in ‘The Insatiable Moon’, Ponsonby, New Zealand, December 2009

*For the next couple of weeks I’m in New Zealand and will be blogging about the production of ‘The Insatiable Moon’, a movie based on Mike Riddell’s novel.

I’m in Ponsonby’s red light district – the portable gazebos we’re using for shade and comfortable eating are the colour of healthy scarlet; appropriate enough, given that today we turn to one of the most troubling scenes in the movie – a scene in which the hidden shame felt by a character leads to disaster. Everyone’s focused on the task in hand: to portray an awful event as truthfully as possible, without exploiting the audience’s emotions, nor denying the fact that human sorrow is real, and touches to us all. If we’re lucky, we might have an Arthur in our lives, someone who sees through the superficial mores of our culture, resists its car rally speed, and offers a human connection in the midst of the awful things that come to us, hopefully only a few times in a full life.

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UPDATE: Our Ben Foster Podcast Interview on ‘The Messenger’ is Now Online – Click Here to Listen or Click Here to Subscribe for Free to the Podcast and have the interview downloaded automatically.

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In February I asked the question of that character actor you may have seen in a comic western, or a sci-fi flick, or a vampire movie, or a vampire western, or a comic book blockbuster or some combination of all of those:

Is Ben Foster the Best Actor in American Film Today?

It’s October now and Foster’s still on my mind .  Just look at him in the trailer for the new Iraq War fallout movie ‘The Messenger’:

Messenger Trailer (Quicktime on Apple trailer site)

He may look like Owen Wilson genetically splurshed with Edward Norton – but by God he knows how to perform in front of a camera.  His energy seems internal – it leaks out of the edges of the frame, like there’s some sort of strange melancholic miasma seeping out of the screen.

He’s the reason I’m seeing ‘Pandorum’ tomorrow – a film that I’d normally avoid as it doesn’t seem to be enough – meaning that right now I’m either into seeing films that are masterpieces, (those that transcend their genre to become lasting works of art), or pics that are absolute trash.  ‘Pandorum’ looks like neither.

As for ‘The Messenger’ – who knows?*

The mere fact that it seems to be a film about adults in real-world situations rather than the usual Ben Foster gig of ‘genre cheese’ bodes well.

I hope it challenges him as an actor – people have a far more critical eye regarding the things they know, (getting drunk, friendships on the road, being attracted to someone), whereas nobody knows what the hell a vampire-cowboy-astronaut sprinting away from some sort of weightless space monster looks like.  Well, at least not yet.

‘The Messenger’ opens October 30th in the U.S.

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*Only caveat: ‘The Messenger’ seems to be suffering from the blue/teal attack we’re currently going through at the pictures (scroll to end of post).  Sigh.

Film Making is a collaborative art.

Want proof?  Check out this description of this ‘Bound for Glory’ panel gone awry, (link courtesy of Higgins who made my day with this link), featuring the late David Carradine and revered cinematographer Haskell Wexler:

Bound for Hell, Or Glory? David Carradine and the Feistiest Film Panel Ever

In case you wonder how fraught the evening actually was in the text linked to above here’s a sample MP3 from the event:

“Hal, just take a minute and stop sniffing that stuff up your nose”

It’s tough to make a film – and not everybody is going it get along.  The author of the piece at top seems surprised that David and Haskell hug at the end – but that’s what you’ve got to do – you’ve got to get along if you want to keep going on.  And make more movies.

There’s a fellow on Myspace who lists his favourite films as ‘Champion’, ‘Paths of Glory’, ‘Spartacus’ and ‘Lonely are the Brave’. These are all pretty strong movies, let’s face it.  It’s clearly a fellow who likes Kirk Douglas.  Turns out that it is Kirk Douglas.

Kirk Douglas is one of those guys who exudes the combination of gravitas and at least imagined integrity that signals ‘Old Hollywood liberal’. I like him; always have – from first seeing him as a cowboy fighting Arnold Schwarzennegger in ‘Cactus Jack’ as the B-film with ‘Raiders of the Lost Ark’ in 1981 in a musty English cinema, to discovering him with James Mason in ‘20 000 Leagues Under the Sea’ on Saturday afternoon TV, to finally getting around to seeing ‘Spartacus’ when I was a late teenager trying to educate myself about film history.

Of course, ‘Paths of Glory’ might be the best film he was ever in, and has his best performance, tortured, vulnerable, simmering as the French army commander whose superiors kill three of his men to teach the others a lesson.

Throw in ‘The List of Adrian Messenger’, ‘Seven Days in May’, ‘The Vikings’, ‘Lust for Life’, and a handful of others and you’ve got the image of mainstream cinema heroism.  If his Myspace page is anything to go by, he thinks the same.  Kirk Douglas.  A Chin for All Seasons.

In This Episode: Walton Goggins / That Evening Sun /  Nashville Film Festival

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