By Barbara Vancheri / Tuesday afternoon,
Sept. 9, 2008
No wonder the sidewalk in front of the Intercontinental Hotel always has an arc of autograph seekers and photographers both professional and amateur. In just the ground-floor restaurant, Colin Firth from the movie "Easy Virtue" is seated to the right while Philip Seymour Hoffman (left, photo credit: Frank Gunn/AP/CP) and Catherine Keener are to the left talking about the new Charlie Kaufman movie "Synecdoche, New York," which both festival moviegoers and volunteers had trouble pronouncing yesterday.
When Hoffman orders a burger and fries, Keener steals a few to nibble on while talking to me. Keener and Hoffman co-starred in "Capote" and she plays his artist-wife in the early part of "Synecdoche" (pronounced Sih-NECK-doh-kee). Kaufman, who wrote "Being John Malkovich," "Adaptation" and "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind," makes his directorial debut with "Synecdoche." And what is Kaufman, who will later be spotted a few tables over, like as a director? "He's just like he is as a person. He's very bright, very helpful, very kind and there are no stupid questions, that's sort of how it feels, which makes you feel OK in asking."
"Synecdoche" is anchored by Hoffman and a female supporting cast that starts with Keener and includes Samantha Morton, Michelle Williams, Emily Watson, Dianne Wiest, Jennifer Jason Leigh and Hope Davis. Hoffman plays a theater director whose health, marriage and world start to collapse, prompting him to use a MacArthur Grant to take over a warehouse in New York where he re-creates not only the streets of New York but his life, with stand-ins for himself and others.
The festival program book aptly calls it "part dream, part puzzle, part brainteaser," and it's all that. More to come when the movie opens in Pittsburgh but, as usual with any Kaufman project, it's unlike anything else out there today as it explores the notions of the passage of time, being the star or an extra in your own life and art imitating life, complete with doppelgangers.
In a private part of the hotel bar, decorated with green suede couches and square ottomans, more actors are talking about more movies. Jeremy Renner and Brian Geraghty (who lived in Pittsburgh from roughly ages 3 to 7 and attended North Allegheny's Espe Elementary School while his father worked for Heinz) are promoting "The Hurt Locker." It's directed by Kathryn Bigelow and focuses on soldiers who disarm IEDs or improvised explosive devices in Baghdad.
To the credit of Bigelow and writer Mark Boal, who had a hand in "In the Valley of Elah," it doesn't debate the merits of the war. It simply embeds us with the U.S. Army's Bravo Company and allows us to count down the dramatic days left in Iraq with them. It's an action movie about the IEDs that don't go off because some fearless unit disarmed them and the ones that do, no matter how hard the men try.
In addition to Renner and Geraghty, it stars Anthony Mackie and features Guy Pearce and Ralph Fiennes in extended cameos. It doesn't have a U.S. distributor but I cannot imagine it won't find one before the festival is over. I talked with Renner and Geraghty and will have more information later this week or early next.
The day started with a press conference with director Gavin O'Connor and actors Edward Norton and Noah Emmerich for "Pride and Glory." Colin Farrell, Jon Voight and Jennifer Ehle also star in the story about families united by blood and by their blue uniforms. Voight plays the policeman patriarch whose sons, Norton and Emmerich, and son-in-law, Farrell, are cops, too.
O'Connor, who comes from a family of cops, said, "I grew up in New York and we always heard ‘Cops bleed blue, cops bleed blue, blue wall of silence,' and I thought it was an interesting idea if you took the notion of cops bleed blue because the fraternity of cops is a family and then you take a real family of cops who bleed red. And you put them in this blender and they collide, what would happen?"
The question of where the loyalties fall is the bedrock of the movie, scheduled to arrive in theaters Oct. 24. Much more about what they had to say next month.
Post-Gazette movie editor Barbara Vancheri can be reached at bvancheri@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1632.
Posted
Sep 10 2008, 09:32 AM
by
Sharon Eberson