Rare is the movie about writer’s block that doesn’t end with the frustrated author scrapping his dead-end drafts in order to “write what you know” — i.e., the film we’ve just sat through. More uncommon still is the dog movie that doesn’t rely on its canine lead to warm hearts, jerk tears or teach its owner important lessons about his humanity. So let’s start by giving the French midlife-crisis drama “My Dog Stupid” credit for doing something different with the trite conventions of the two feel-good categories to which it belongs.
Writer-director Yvan Attal has made three films with real-life wife Charlotte Gainsbourg — “My Wife Is an Actress,” “Happily Ever After” and now this — and with each movie, he sands away still more of the mystique that surrounds celebrity couples. Here, he plays Henri Mohen, the literary equivalent of a one-hit wonder, coasting on the...
Writer-director Yvan Attal has made three films with real-life wife Charlotte Gainsbourg — “My Wife Is an Actress,” “Happily Ever After” and now this — and with each movie, he sands away still more of the mystique that surrounds celebrity couples. Here, he plays Henri Mohen, the literary equivalent of a one-hit wonder, coasting on the...
- 7/31/2020
- by Peter Debruge
- Variety Film + TV
Although his books were championed by the likes of Charles Bukowski, considered precursors to the Beats and adapted into several movies — including Robert Towne’s misbegotten Colin Farrell-Selma Hayek starrer Ask the Dusk (2006) — the Italian-American novelist and screenwriter John Fante remains a fairly unknown quantity in the U.S., whereas in France he’s an author whose work can be found at any local bookstore.
After achieving minor success in the 1930s with his early autobiographical novels, Fante spent the rest of his life cashing paychecks as a Hollywood scribe, with credits that include forgotten films like ...
After achieving minor success in the 1930s with his early autobiographical novels, Fante spent the rest of his life cashing paychecks as a Hollywood scribe, with credits that include forgotten films like ...
- 10/31/2019
- The Hollywood Reporter - Movie News
Although his books were championed by the likes of Charles Bukowski, considered precursors to the Beats and adapted into several movies — including Robert Towne’s misbegotten Colin Farrell-Selma Hayek starrer Ask the Dusk (2006) — the Italian-American novelist and screenwriter John Fante remains a fairly unknown quantity in the U.S., whereas in France he’s an author whose work can be found at any local bookstore.
After achieving minor success in the 1930s with his early autobiographical novels, Fante spent the rest of his life cashing paychecks as a Hollywood scribe, with credits that include forgotten films like ...
After achieving minor success in the 1930s with his early autobiographical novels, Fante spent the rest of his life cashing paychecks as a Hollywood scribe, with credits that include forgotten films like ...
- 10/31/2019
- The Hollywood Reporter - Film + TV
Ten titles in competition and a slew of premieres await audiences at the 12th edition of the Francophone Film Festival, which will unspool from 20-25 August. Tomorrow, My Stupid Dog by Yvan Attal (an adaptation of the John Fante novel of the same name starring the director himself as well as Charlotte Gainsbourg) will have the honour of opening the 12th edition of the Angoulême Francophone Film Festival (20-25 August 2019) as a premiere screening, out of competition. Angoulême has become a very popular event for French distributors, who get the opportunity to test out their films before they are released in theatres after the summer holidays.Chaired by British actress Jacqueline Bisset (and also including such names as Swiss filmmaker Bettina Oberli and French director Louis-Julien Petit), the competition jury will be tasked with weighing up the ten contenders for the 2019 Valois d'Or. Four Cannes titles are in the...
Studiocanal has sold near all of the world outside the U.S. on Hugo Gélin’s “Love at Second Sight.” The European production-distribution-sales giant, part of Vivendi’s Canal Plus Group, has also kicked off promising sales on a panoply of new foreign-language titles, such as Yvan Attal’s “My Dog Stupid,” Cedric Klapisch’s “Someone Somewhere” and animated feature “Samsam.”
“Our mission at Studiocanal is to ensure we make high-quality European cinema with strong global potential,” said Anna Marsh, Studiocanal Evp, international distribution.
Described by Marsh as a “key title, a high concept movie which really appeals.” “Love at Second Sight” stars François Civil as a young best-selling novelist who forgets the love of his life in one world to wake up in another where she’s a world-famous pianist who’s never met him.
Combining large ambition, a questioning take on gender equality in relationships, and a director whose 2017 debut,...
“Our mission at Studiocanal is to ensure we make high-quality European cinema with strong global potential,” said Anna Marsh, Studiocanal Evp, international distribution.
Described by Marsh as a “key title, a high concept movie which really appeals.” “Love at Second Sight” stars François Civil as a young best-selling novelist who forgets the love of his life in one world to wake up in another where she’s a world-famous pianist who’s never met him.
Combining large ambition, a questioning take on gender equality in relationships, and a director whose 2017 debut,...
- 2/14/2019
- by John Hopewell
- Variety Film + TV
A extensive look at all those movies James Franco directed.
James Franco has done a lot of things, we’ve heard. Following a successful turn on Judd Apatow’s Freaks and Geeks and a well-received starring spot on a TNT biopic on James Dean, he turned immediately to a litany of pursuits: from playwriting and English degrees to painting and directing no less than ten feature-lengths. The latter project interested me. Were they any good? In Franco’s Rolling Stone profile last year, Jonah Weiner ran around a thesaurus of words like “dizzying,” “indefatigable“ and, wait for it, “multihyphenate” to describe his subject but none of those words mean very much. Paul Klee painted over a thousand paintings in the penultimate last year of his life. So could I. So what?
“What did we do to deserve James Franco?,” asked Rex Reed in a slightly different era. Back then, even the The Guardian agreed with Jared Kushner...
James Franco has done a lot of things, we’ve heard. Following a successful turn on Judd Apatow’s Freaks and Geeks and a well-received starring spot on a TNT biopic on James Dean, he turned immediately to a litany of pursuits: from playwriting and English degrees to painting and directing no less than ten feature-lengths. The latter project interested me. Were they any good? In Franco’s Rolling Stone profile last year, Jonah Weiner ran around a thesaurus of words like “dizzying,” “indefatigable“ and, wait for it, “multihyphenate” to describe his subject but none of those words mean very much. Paul Klee painted over a thousand paintings in the penultimate last year of his life. So could I. So what?
“What did we do to deserve James Franco?,” asked Rex Reed in a slightly different era. Back then, even the The Guardian agreed with Jared Kushner...
- 4/13/2017
- by Andrew Karpan
- FilmSchoolRejects.com
Author Dan Fante, who boozed, scrapped and wrote his way out of the considerable shadow cast by his father and fellow novelist John Fante, died Saturday. He was 71. Fante was born and died in Los Angeles, and he painted colorful prose portraits of life on the hustle in the city. Several of his books and plays, including the novel “Chump Change” and “Short Dog/Cab Driver Stories From the L.A. Streets,” drew on his experiences as a telemarketer, taxi driver, private investigator, salesman and Santa Monica Pier carnival barker. His famous father did the same thing in his books including “Ask the Dust,...
- 11/26/2015
- by Todd Cunningham
- The Wrap
Photo Credit: Ron Murray
Screenwriter John Ridley joined family members of nineteenth-century author Solomon Northup to receive the 26th-annual USC Libraries Scripter Award for “12 Years a Slave.” Selection committee co-chair Howard Rodman announced the winners at the black-tie event on Saturday, Feb. 8, at USC’s Doheny Memorial Library.
“Until I read Solomon’s memoir, I didn’t know what being a writer was all about,” Ridley said in his acceptance speech. “The way that Solomon wrote, the clarity with which he wrote, and more importantly, the strength of his character, what he went through without bitterness, without hate—that really taught me something.”
“12 Years a Slave’s” Scripter win adds to the growing number of awards for the Fox Searchlight film, including best motion picture in the drama category at last month’s Golden Globes. The film is nominated for nine Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Adapted Screenplay.
Screenwriter John Ridley joined family members of nineteenth-century author Solomon Northup to receive the 26th-annual USC Libraries Scripter Award for “12 Years a Slave.” Selection committee co-chair Howard Rodman announced the winners at the black-tie event on Saturday, Feb. 8, at USC’s Doheny Memorial Library.
“Until I read Solomon’s memoir, I didn’t know what being a writer was all about,” Ridley said in his acceptance speech. “The way that Solomon wrote, the clarity with which he wrote, and more importantly, the strength of his character, what he went through without bitterness, without hate—that really taught me something.”
“12 Years a Slave’s” Scripter win adds to the growing number of awards for the Fox Searchlight film, including best motion picture in the drama category at last month’s Golden Globes. The film is nominated for nine Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Adapted Screenplay.
- 2/9/2014
- by Michelle McCue
- WeAreMovieGeeks.com
After years of Matthew Weiner mooning over classic advertising illustrations from the sixties, the Mad Men team went to the real deal for some of this year's promo imagery. "Finally they just looked up the person who had done all these drawings that I really loved, and they said: 'Hey, we’ve got the guy who did them. And he’s still working. His name is Brian Sanders,'" Weiner says. Sanders, a 75-year-old who once spent months illustrating Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey set and later did paperback covers for authors like John Steinbeck and John Fante, came up with an image of Don Draper that "looks as if it has time-traveled from the pages of an old copy of Reader’s Digest," per the Times. "What it did was take me right back, about 50 years," Sanders says, adding that he was already a Mad Men fan...
- 3/11/2013
- by Zach Dionne
- Vulture
Deborah Kerr in the classic ghost story The Innocents, screenplay by Truman Capote.
The Anthology Film Archives in New York is holding a unique film festival throughout the month of September honoring screenwriters who were best known for their work as novelists. Here are the details:
On this calendar we are highlighting the screenwriting work of writers best known as novelists – including pulp novelists like Richard Matheson, Donald Westlake, and Elmore Leonard, cult figures such as Don Carpenter and John Fante, and such highly respected authors as Truman Capote and Joan Didion. Paying homage to the long tradition of novelists trying their hand at writing for the movies, we will present a selection of films based not on these writers’ novels, but on their original screenplays (which are sometimes adaptations of other novelists’ work).
From The Pen Of is programmed in close collaboration with author/musician Alan Licht.
Very special thanks to Alan Licht,...
The Anthology Film Archives in New York is holding a unique film festival throughout the month of September honoring screenwriters who were best known for their work as novelists. Here are the details:
On this calendar we are highlighting the screenwriting work of writers best known as novelists – including pulp novelists like Richard Matheson, Donald Westlake, and Elmore Leonard, cult figures such as Don Carpenter and John Fante, and such highly respected authors as Truman Capote and Joan Didion. Paying homage to the long tradition of novelists trying their hand at writing for the movies, we will present a selection of films based not on these writers’ novels, but on their original screenplays (which are sometimes adaptations of other novelists’ work).
From The Pen Of is programmed in close collaboration with author/musician Alan Licht.
Very special thanks to Alan Licht,...
- 9/5/2012
- by nospam@example.com (Cinema Retro)
- Cinemaretro.com
Joe Dante
Cinema Retro has received the following announcement from Larry Edmunds Book Shop in Hollywood- and it's pretty exciting. Two iconic directors, Joe Dante and John Landis, in a joint appearance:
Normal 0 false false false En-us X-none X-none MicrosoftInternetExplorer4
Our first 2 events this year were both fantastic, and these 2 promise to be even better!
First up, is a night with Lava(Los Angeles Visionairies Association) at the world famous Musso & Franks Grill on Monday, January 23rd, 6-11 pm, for a literary salon with Angeleno writer Dan Fante, who will be discussing his father, John Fante and signing the book, "Fante- A Family's Legacy of Writing, Drinking & Surviving" . This will be a night spent not only at Musso's ,but in the space that used to be occupied by the Stanley Rose Bookshop. Hemingway, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, West, Parker, Fante & more held court at this legendary west coast hangout which also featured an employee named Larry Edmunds.
Cinema Retro has received the following announcement from Larry Edmunds Book Shop in Hollywood- and it's pretty exciting. Two iconic directors, Joe Dante and John Landis, in a joint appearance:
Normal 0 false false false En-us X-none X-none MicrosoftInternetExplorer4
Our first 2 events this year were both fantastic, and these 2 promise to be even better!
First up, is a night with Lava(Los Angeles Visionairies Association) at the world famous Musso & Franks Grill on Monday, January 23rd, 6-11 pm, for a literary salon with Angeleno writer Dan Fante, who will be discussing his father, John Fante and signing the book, "Fante- A Family's Legacy of Writing, Drinking & Surviving" . This will be a night spent not only at Musso's ,but in the space that used to be occupied by the Stanley Rose Bookshop. Hemingway, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, West, Parker, Fante & more held court at this legendary west coast hangout which also featured an employee named Larry Edmunds.
- 1/20/2012
- by nospam@example.com (Cinema Retro)
- Cinemaretro.com
Adam Goldberg was staying under an assumed name in a hotel that tried to charge him $20 for some toothpaste when I caught up with him about his latest record, The Goldberg Sisters. He got out of the crowded LANDy business after confusing debacles with a Taiwanese pop singer, a Mexican troubadour and another Landy who was already on Myspace featuring Auto-Tune raps with titles like "I Just Wanna Fuck."
Thus, out of a necessity to differentiate himself, The Goldberg Sisters were born. Incidentally, there really are two Goldberg sisters, but it's clear at this point that they have nothing to do with this record. We talked about all the twiddling that went down, and then moved on to some mutually favorite subjects, like David Lynch film scores, and the little moments in films that stay with you forever.
The last time we spoke you had just released a record as Landy,...
Thus, out of a necessity to differentiate himself, The Goldberg Sisters were born. Incidentally, there really are two Goldberg sisters, but it's clear at this point that they have nothing to do with this record. We talked about all the twiddling that went down, and then moved on to some mutually favorite subjects, like David Lynch film scores, and the little moments in films that stay with you forever.
The last time we spoke you had just released a record as Landy,...
- 4/19/2011
- by Brandon Kim
- ifc.com
Unlock the secret world of Los Angeles and you'll discover a city full of hidden gems – including a magician's castle, a naked spa and a fictional heritage tour
All I am told is to wear black tie and not to bring a camera. So now, in a cocktail dress and stilettos, I stand outside a vast pink hotel on scruffy Venice Beach boardwalk, waiting among psychics, street pianists, body builders and beach bums, for my evening's guide to turn up.
"Never put out on the first date, remember," cackles an ancient woman dragging a shopping trolley of Reader's Digest magazines down the street. I check my watch for the ninth time that minute and see a 10-year-old doing back-flips off a bench, landing like an alley cat each time. It is the end of a busy public holiday weekend and the boardwalk is finally packing up when a junk-heap grey Volvo pulls up.
All I am told is to wear black tie and not to bring a camera. So now, in a cocktail dress and stilettos, I stand outside a vast pink hotel on scruffy Venice Beach boardwalk, waiting among psychics, street pianists, body builders and beach bums, for my evening's guide to turn up.
"Never put out on the first date, remember," cackles an ancient woman dragging a shopping trolley of Reader's Digest magazines down the street. I check my watch for the ninth time that minute and see a 10-year-old doing back-flips off a bench, landing like an alley cat each time. It is the end of a busy public holiday weekend and the boardwalk is finally packing up when a junk-heap grey Volvo pulls up.
- 3/27/2011
- The Guardian - Film News
New Moca director Jeffrey Deitch might have just accepted the art world's most controversial position, but if there's one thing everyone can agree he's great at, it's throwing a party. And now, he's got a bright, blank new L.A. canvas to work with. We asked artists, curators and critics to provide some guidance for Deitch's new gig.
Time to pitch a Moca reality show to one of the major networks now that you're in L.A. The concept is your life: "Ack! The economy's gone to shit so now I'm a newbie museum director." During this 13-episode series viewers will watch you navigate museum politics, get lost in L.A. and schmooze with celebrities and art glitterati. Show title: Sink or Swim! The prize: Glory--and the USA's best museum stays open.-Paddy Johnson, Art Fag City
Deitch should expand his plans with James Franco and General Hospital and embrace Los Angeles' soap opera scene.
Time to pitch a Moca reality show to one of the major networks now that you're in L.A. The concept is your life: "Ack! The economy's gone to shit so now I'm a newbie museum director." During this 13-episode series viewers will watch you navigate museum politics, get lost in L.A. and schmooze with celebrities and art glitterati. Show title: Sink or Swim! The prize: Glory--and the USA's best museum stays open.-Paddy Johnson, Art Fag City
Deitch should expand his plans with James Franco and General Hospital and embrace Los Angeles' soap opera scene.
- 1/14/2010
- by Alissa Walker
- Fast Company
- Ask the Dust Click here to read the review! "Most surprising is that we’d figure Towne’s fountain of experience would carve out the best from John Fante's noir novel, it may have served as great source material but the film falters because the connection between the characters and this place in history is not strong enough making the great depression looking rosy when it should have been grim-colored"...
- 3/18/2006
- IONCINEMA.com
Screened
Santa Barbara International Film Festival
SANTA BARBARA, Calif. -- Much admired by Charles Bukowski and occupying a hallowed place in the literature of Los Angeles, John Fante's slender 1939 novel "Ask the Dust" pulses with the bruised but hopeful poetry of outsiders' yearnings. The love-hate romance at its center involves not only the tug of war between writer Arturo Bandini and waitress Camilla Lopez but the tension between WASP America and the rest of us, self-realization and shame, the skyward-reaching city and the wild natural continent.
Screenwriter Robert Towne, a great chronicler of Los Angeles in "Chinatown" and "Shampoo", would seem the perfect big-screen translator of the influential book, here taking the helm as well as scripting. To an extent he is, but Towne also inexplicably softens the story's noir edge, lapsing into melodrama and hammering at his themes instead of delving deeper into his characters. Despite what are likely to be mixed reviews, the project's literary/cinematic pedigree and topliners Colin Farrell and Salma Hayek will be certain lures when the film opens March 10 in limited release, after its world premiere at the Santa Barbara fest.
Towne's fourth directorial outing is an exceptionally handsome evocation of 1930s Los Angeles (shot in South Africa), with cinematographer Caleb Deschanel ("The Passion of the Christ") casting the proceedings in a burnished desert glow, a dreamy grit like the Mojave sand that permeates the city streets. The film is faithful to the book's tone of dark ache and much of its detail and for the most part terrifically cast. But Towne can't overcome an essential challenge of the material: Arturo and Camilla are constructs and ciphers as much as they are vivid characters -- difficult roles, to be sure. Neither the screenplay nor the actors manage to get far under their skin.
The story opens as Arturo Bandini (Farrell), subsisting on oranges and cigarettes and six weeks in arrears on his $4-a-week rent, ponders what to do with his last nickel. It has been five months since the good-looking young man arrived in L.A. from Colorado, with high hopes, an Underwood and a suitcase full of copies of his one published story. Determined to be a great writer of fiction, he rents a furnished room at the Alta Loma, a residential hotel built against the slope of Bunker Hill.
Arturo meets Mexican beauty Camilla when she's waiting tables at the Columbia Cafe, the downtown establishment where he spends that last nickel on an a cup of undrinkable joe. Their attraction quickly finds expression in cruelty. With a pointed stare at the huaraches in which Camilla glides about the dining room, Arturo takes great pleasure in shaking her out of her haughty self-confidence, arousing her shame about not being a "real" American. A pas de deux of one-upmanship begins, each expertly finding the other's sore spots -- easy to do when their insecurities are nearly identical. In the unenlightened parlance of the day, Camilla and Italian-American Arturo are both "spicks," a point Towne's script stresses repeatedly. It also adds an excruciating bit of business in which Arturo teaches Camilla to read English.
Towne's grasp of the story's existential core is shaky, but he turns the story's central romantic episode into a piece of exquisite cinema: Arturo and Camilla rushing naked into the moonlit Santa Monica surf, their exultation quickly turning to angry tussling. With haunting imagery, Deschanel captures the beauty of the two leads, tossed by the silver waves.
Farrell puts across the conflicted, virginal Catholic boy beneath the swagger, pretending to be worldly while fearfully resisting the more experienced Camilla's bold overtures. The film doesn't shy away from the ugliness of their strange courtship, but their games grow tiresome and never accrue much emotional weight. Losing steam in stretches of flat melodrama, the film lapses into bathos, nearly veering into "Love Story" territory.
Playing a character quite a bit younger than herself, Hayek has never looked more beautiful, and Camilla's tempestuous spirit finds full expression in her performance. Still, the sense of who Camilla is doesn't deepen as the story progresses. For his part, Farrell often struggles to indicate anything beyond observer Arturo's surface reactions, and the character remains opaque, even in a disturbing interlude with Vera Rivkin. Idina Menzel ("Rent") is heartbreaking as the wounded soul who sweeps into Arturo's room like a Santa Ana, all devouring gaze.
There are plenty of tantalizing performances at the edges of the narrative, especially the wonderful, pitch-perfect work by Donald Sutherland (who starred 30 years ago in the film adaptation of another revered L.A. novel, "Day of the Locust"), playing Arturo's dissolute neighbor Hellfrick. Eileen Atkins contributes a nuanced cameo as the landlady with a distaste for Mexicans and Jews, and Jeremy Crutchley makes an impression as informative barkeep Solomon. Providing the amused, avuncular voice of real-life American Mercury editor H.L. Mencken, Arturoıs benefactor and deity, is real-life critic Richard Schickel.
Towne and Deschanel never lose sight of Los Angeles as a naive, impermanent interloper, most dramatically in an earthquake sequence full of buckling pavement and crumbling buildings. The South African landscape is an evocative if not an accurate substitute (there's nary a Joshua Tree in sight). Dennis Gassner's production design and Albert Wolsky's costumes re-create the period with fittingly subdued detail, as does the music of Ramin Djawadi and Heitor Pereira.
ASK THE DUST
Paramount Classics
in association with Capitol Films a Cruise/Wagner, VIP Medienfonds 3, Ascendant production
Credits:
Director-screenwriter: Robert Towne
Based on the novel by: John Fante
Producers: Tom Cruise, Paula Wagner, Don Granger, Jonas McCord
Executive producers: Redmond Morris, Mark Roemmich, David Selvan, Andreas Schmid, Andy Grosch, Chris Roberts
Director of photography: Caleb Deschanel
Production designer: Dennis Gassner
Music: Ramin Djawadi, Heitor Pereira
Co-producers: Galit Hakmon McCord, Kia Jam, Andreas Schmid
Costume designer: Albert Wolsky
Editor: Robert K. Lambert
Cast:
Arturo Bandini: Colin Farrell
Camilla Lopez: Salma Hayek
Hellfrick: Donald Sutherland
Eileen Atkins
Vera Rivkin: Idina Menzel
Sammy: Justin Kirk
Solomon: Jeremy Crutchley
Voice of Mencken: Richard Schickel
MPAA rating R
Running time --117 minutes...
Santa Barbara International Film Festival
SANTA BARBARA, Calif. -- Much admired by Charles Bukowski and occupying a hallowed place in the literature of Los Angeles, John Fante's slender 1939 novel "Ask the Dust" pulses with the bruised but hopeful poetry of outsiders' yearnings. The love-hate romance at its center involves not only the tug of war between writer Arturo Bandini and waitress Camilla Lopez but the tension between WASP America and the rest of us, self-realization and shame, the skyward-reaching city and the wild natural continent.
Screenwriter Robert Towne, a great chronicler of Los Angeles in "Chinatown" and "Shampoo", would seem the perfect big-screen translator of the influential book, here taking the helm as well as scripting. To an extent he is, but Towne also inexplicably softens the story's noir edge, lapsing into melodrama and hammering at his themes instead of delving deeper into his characters. Despite what are likely to be mixed reviews, the project's literary/cinematic pedigree and topliners Colin Farrell and Salma Hayek will be certain lures when the film opens March 10 in limited release, after its world premiere at the Santa Barbara fest.
Towne's fourth directorial outing is an exceptionally handsome evocation of 1930s Los Angeles (shot in South Africa), with cinematographer Caleb Deschanel ("The Passion of the Christ") casting the proceedings in a burnished desert glow, a dreamy grit like the Mojave sand that permeates the city streets. The film is faithful to the book's tone of dark ache and much of its detail and for the most part terrifically cast. But Towne can't overcome an essential challenge of the material: Arturo and Camilla are constructs and ciphers as much as they are vivid characters -- difficult roles, to be sure. Neither the screenplay nor the actors manage to get far under their skin.
The story opens as Arturo Bandini (Farrell), subsisting on oranges and cigarettes and six weeks in arrears on his $4-a-week rent, ponders what to do with his last nickel. It has been five months since the good-looking young man arrived in L.A. from Colorado, with high hopes, an Underwood and a suitcase full of copies of his one published story. Determined to be a great writer of fiction, he rents a furnished room at the Alta Loma, a residential hotel built against the slope of Bunker Hill.
Arturo meets Mexican beauty Camilla when she's waiting tables at the Columbia Cafe, the downtown establishment where he spends that last nickel on an a cup of undrinkable joe. Their attraction quickly finds expression in cruelty. With a pointed stare at the huaraches in which Camilla glides about the dining room, Arturo takes great pleasure in shaking her out of her haughty self-confidence, arousing her shame about not being a "real" American. A pas de deux of one-upmanship begins, each expertly finding the other's sore spots -- easy to do when their insecurities are nearly identical. In the unenlightened parlance of the day, Camilla and Italian-American Arturo are both "spicks," a point Towne's script stresses repeatedly. It also adds an excruciating bit of business in which Arturo teaches Camilla to read English.
Towne's grasp of the story's existential core is shaky, but he turns the story's central romantic episode into a piece of exquisite cinema: Arturo and Camilla rushing naked into the moonlit Santa Monica surf, their exultation quickly turning to angry tussling. With haunting imagery, Deschanel captures the beauty of the two leads, tossed by the silver waves.
Farrell puts across the conflicted, virginal Catholic boy beneath the swagger, pretending to be worldly while fearfully resisting the more experienced Camilla's bold overtures. The film doesn't shy away from the ugliness of their strange courtship, but their games grow tiresome and never accrue much emotional weight. Losing steam in stretches of flat melodrama, the film lapses into bathos, nearly veering into "Love Story" territory.
Playing a character quite a bit younger than herself, Hayek has never looked more beautiful, and Camilla's tempestuous spirit finds full expression in her performance. Still, the sense of who Camilla is doesn't deepen as the story progresses. For his part, Farrell often struggles to indicate anything beyond observer Arturo's surface reactions, and the character remains opaque, even in a disturbing interlude with Vera Rivkin. Idina Menzel ("Rent") is heartbreaking as the wounded soul who sweeps into Arturo's room like a Santa Ana, all devouring gaze.
There are plenty of tantalizing performances at the edges of the narrative, especially the wonderful, pitch-perfect work by Donald Sutherland (who starred 30 years ago in the film adaptation of another revered L.A. novel, "Day of the Locust"), playing Arturo's dissolute neighbor Hellfrick. Eileen Atkins contributes a nuanced cameo as the landlady with a distaste for Mexicans and Jews, and Jeremy Crutchley makes an impression as informative barkeep Solomon. Providing the amused, avuncular voice of real-life American Mercury editor H.L. Mencken, Arturoıs benefactor and deity, is real-life critic Richard Schickel.
Towne and Deschanel never lose sight of Los Angeles as a naive, impermanent interloper, most dramatically in an earthquake sequence full of buckling pavement and crumbling buildings. The South African landscape is an evocative if not an accurate substitute (there's nary a Joshua Tree in sight). Dennis Gassner's production design and Albert Wolsky's costumes re-create the period with fittingly subdued detail, as does the music of Ramin Djawadi and Heitor Pereira.
ASK THE DUST
Paramount Classics
in association with Capitol Films a Cruise/Wagner, VIP Medienfonds 3, Ascendant production
Credits:
Director-screenwriter: Robert Towne
Based on the novel by: John Fante
Producers: Tom Cruise, Paula Wagner, Don Granger, Jonas McCord
Executive producers: Redmond Morris, Mark Roemmich, David Selvan, Andreas Schmid, Andy Grosch, Chris Roberts
Director of photography: Caleb Deschanel
Production designer: Dennis Gassner
Music: Ramin Djawadi, Heitor Pereira
Co-producers: Galit Hakmon McCord, Kia Jam, Andreas Schmid
Costume designer: Albert Wolsky
Editor: Robert K. Lambert
Cast:
Arturo Bandini: Colin Farrell
Camilla Lopez: Salma Hayek
Hellfrick: Donald Sutherland
Eileen Atkins
Vera Rivkin: Idina Menzel
Sammy: Justin Kirk
Solomon: Jeremy Crutchley
Voice of Mencken: Richard Schickel
MPAA rating R
Running time --117 minutes...
Screened
Santa Barbara International Film Festival
SANTA BARBARA, Calif. -- Much admired by Charles Bukowski and occupying a hallowed place in the literature of Los Angeles, John Fante's slender 1939 novel "Ask the Dust" pulses with the bruised but hopeful poetry of outsiders' yearnings. The love-hate romance at its center involves not only the tug of war between writer Arturo Bandini and waitress Camilla Lopez but the tension between WASP America and the rest of us, self-realization and shame, the skyward-reaching city and the wild natural continent.
Screenwriter Robert Towne, a great chronicler of Los Angeles in "Chinatown" and "Shampoo", would seem the perfect big-screen translator of the influential book, here taking the helm as well as scripting. To an extent he is, but Towne also inexplicably softens the story's noir edge, lapsing into melodrama and hammering at his themes instead of delving deeper into his characters. Despite what are likely to be mixed reviews, the project's literary/cinematic pedigree and topliners Colin Farrell and Salma Hayek will be certain lures when the film opens March 10 in limited release, after its world premiere at the Santa Barbara fest.
Towne's fourth directorial outing is an exceptionally handsome evocation of 1930s Los Angeles (shot in South Africa), with cinematographer Caleb Deschanel ("The Passion of the Christ") casting the proceedings in a burnished desert glow, a dreamy grit like the Mojave sand that permeates the city streets. The film is faithful to the book's tone of dark ache and much of its detail and for the most part terrifically cast. But Towne can't overcome an essential challenge of the material: Arturo and Camilla are constructs and ciphers as much as they are vivid characters -- difficult roles, to be sure. Neither the screenplay nor the actors manage to get far under their skin.
The story opens as Arturo Bandini (Farrell), subsisting on oranges and cigarettes and six weeks in arrears on his $4-a-week rent, ponders what to do with his last nickel. It has been five months since the good-looking young man arrived in L.A. from Colorado, with high hopes, an Underwood and a suitcase full of copies of his one published story. Determined to be a great writer of fiction, he rents a furnished room at the Alta Loma, a residential hotel built against the slope of Bunker Hill.
Arturo meets Mexican beauty Camilla when she's waiting tables at the Columbia Cafe, the downtown establishment where he spends that last nickel on an a cup of undrinkable joe. Their attraction quickly finds expression in cruelty. With a pointed stare at the huaraches in which Camilla glides about the dining room, Arturo takes great pleasure in shaking her out of her haughty self-confidence, arousing her shame about not being a "real" American. A pas de deux of one-upmanship begins, each expertly finding the other's sore spots -- easy to do when their insecurities are nearly identical. In the unenlightened parlance of the day, Camilla and Italian-American Arturo are both "spicks," a point Towne's script stresses repeatedly. It also adds an excruciating bit of business in which Arturo teaches Camilla to read English.
Towne's grasp of the story's existential core is shaky, but he turns the story's central romantic episode into a piece of exquisite cinema: Arturo and Camilla rushing naked into the moonlit Santa Monica surf, their exultation quickly turning to angry tussling. With haunting imagery, Deschanel captures the beauty of the two leads, tossed by the silver waves.
Farrell puts across the conflicted, virginal Catholic boy beneath the swagger, pretending to be worldly while fearfully resisting the more experienced Camilla's bold overtures. The film doesn't shy away from the ugliness of their strange courtship, but their games grow tiresome and never accrue much emotional weight. Losing steam in stretches of flat melodrama, the film lapses into bathos, nearly veering into "Love Story" territory.
Playing a character quite a bit younger than herself, Hayek has never looked more beautiful, and Camilla's tempestuous spirit finds full expression in her performance. Still, the sense of who Camilla is doesn't deepen as the story progresses. For his part, Farrell often struggles to indicate anything beyond observer Arturo's surface reactions, and the character remains opaque, even in a disturbing interlude with Vera Rivkin. Idina Menzel ("Rent") is heartbreaking as the wounded soul who sweeps into Arturo's room like a Santa Ana, all devouring gaze.
There are plenty of tantalizing performances at the edges of the narrative, especially the wonderful, pitch-perfect work by Donald Sutherland (who starred 30 years ago in the film adaptation of another revered L.A. novel, "Day of the Locust"), playing Arturo's dissolute neighbor Hellfrick. Eileen Atkins contributes a nuanced cameo as the landlady with a distaste for Mexicans and Jews, and Jeremy Crutchley makes an impression as informative barkeep Solomon. Providing the amused, avuncular voice of real-life American Mercury editor H.L. Mencken, Arturoıs benefactor and deity, is real-life critic Richard Schickel.
Towne and Deschanel never lose sight of Los Angeles as a naive, impermanent interloper, most dramatically in an earthquake sequence full of buckling pavement and crumbling buildings. The South African landscape is an evocative if not an accurate substitute (there's nary a Joshua Tree in sight). Dennis Gassner's production design and Albert Wolsky's costumes re-create the period with fittingly subdued detail, as does the music of Ramin Djawadi and Heitor Pereira.
ASK THE DUST
Paramount Classics
in association with Capitol Films a Cruise/Wagner, VIP Medienfonds 3, Ascendant production
Credits:
Director-screenwriter: Robert Towne
Based on the novel by: John Fante
Producers: Tom Cruise, Paula Wagner, Don Granger, Jonas McCord
Executive producers: Redmond Morris, Mark Roemmich, David Selvan, Andreas Schmid, Andy Grosch, Chris Roberts
Director of photography: Caleb Deschanel
Production designer: Dennis Gassner
Music: Ramin Djawadi, Heitor Pereira
Co-producers: Galit Hakmon McCord, Kia Jam, Andreas Schmid
Costume designer: Albert Wolsky
Editor: Robert K. Lambert
Cast:
Arturo Bandini: Colin Farrell
Camilla Lopez: Salma Hayek
Hellfrick: Donald Sutherland
Eileen Atkins
Vera Rivkin: Idina Menzel
Sammy: Justin Kirk
Solomon: Jeremy Crutchley
Voice of Mencken: Richard Schickel
MPAA rating R
Running time --117 minutes...
Santa Barbara International Film Festival
SANTA BARBARA, Calif. -- Much admired by Charles Bukowski and occupying a hallowed place in the literature of Los Angeles, John Fante's slender 1939 novel "Ask the Dust" pulses with the bruised but hopeful poetry of outsiders' yearnings. The love-hate romance at its center involves not only the tug of war between writer Arturo Bandini and waitress Camilla Lopez but the tension between WASP America and the rest of us, self-realization and shame, the skyward-reaching city and the wild natural continent.
Screenwriter Robert Towne, a great chronicler of Los Angeles in "Chinatown" and "Shampoo", would seem the perfect big-screen translator of the influential book, here taking the helm as well as scripting. To an extent he is, but Towne also inexplicably softens the story's noir edge, lapsing into melodrama and hammering at his themes instead of delving deeper into his characters. Despite what are likely to be mixed reviews, the project's literary/cinematic pedigree and topliners Colin Farrell and Salma Hayek will be certain lures when the film opens March 10 in limited release, after its world premiere at the Santa Barbara fest.
Towne's fourth directorial outing is an exceptionally handsome evocation of 1930s Los Angeles (shot in South Africa), with cinematographer Caleb Deschanel ("The Passion of the Christ") casting the proceedings in a burnished desert glow, a dreamy grit like the Mojave sand that permeates the city streets. The film is faithful to the book's tone of dark ache and much of its detail and for the most part terrifically cast. But Towne can't overcome an essential challenge of the material: Arturo and Camilla are constructs and ciphers as much as they are vivid characters -- difficult roles, to be sure. Neither the screenplay nor the actors manage to get far under their skin.
The story opens as Arturo Bandini (Farrell), subsisting on oranges and cigarettes and six weeks in arrears on his $4-a-week rent, ponders what to do with his last nickel. It has been five months since the good-looking young man arrived in L.A. from Colorado, with high hopes, an Underwood and a suitcase full of copies of his one published story. Determined to be a great writer of fiction, he rents a furnished room at the Alta Loma, a residential hotel built against the slope of Bunker Hill.
Arturo meets Mexican beauty Camilla when she's waiting tables at the Columbia Cafe, the downtown establishment where he spends that last nickel on an a cup of undrinkable joe. Their attraction quickly finds expression in cruelty. With a pointed stare at the huaraches in which Camilla glides about the dining room, Arturo takes great pleasure in shaking her out of her haughty self-confidence, arousing her shame about not being a "real" American. A pas de deux of one-upmanship begins, each expertly finding the other's sore spots -- easy to do when their insecurities are nearly identical. In the unenlightened parlance of the day, Camilla and Italian-American Arturo are both "spicks," a point Towne's script stresses repeatedly. It also adds an excruciating bit of business in which Arturo teaches Camilla to read English.
Towne's grasp of the story's existential core is shaky, but he turns the story's central romantic episode into a piece of exquisite cinema: Arturo and Camilla rushing naked into the moonlit Santa Monica surf, their exultation quickly turning to angry tussling. With haunting imagery, Deschanel captures the beauty of the two leads, tossed by the silver waves.
Farrell puts across the conflicted, virginal Catholic boy beneath the swagger, pretending to be worldly while fearfully resisting the more experienced Camilla's bold overtures. The film doesn't shy away from the ugliness of their strange courtship, but their games grow tiresome and never accrue much emotional weight. Losing steam in stretches of flat melodrama, the film lapses into bathos, nearly veering into "Love Story" territory.
Playing a character quite a bit younger than herself, Hayek has never looked more beautiful, and Camilla's tempestuous spirit finds full expression in her performance. Still, the sense of who Camilla is doesn't deepen as the story progresses. For his part, Farrell often struggles to indicate anything beyond observer Arturo's surface reactions, and the character remains opaque, even in a disturbing interlude with Vera Rivkin. Idina Menzel ("Rent") is heartbreaking as the wounded soul who sweeps into Arturo's room like a Santa Ana, all devouring gaze.
There are plenty of tantalizing performances at the edges of the narrative, especially the wonderful, pitch-perfect work by Donald Sutherland (who starred 30 years ago in the film adaptation of another revered L.A. novel, "Day of the Locust"), playing Arturo's dissolute neighbor Hellfrick. Eileen Atkins contributes a nuanced cameo as the landlady with a distaste for Mexicans and Jews, and Jeremy Crutchley makes an impression as informative barkeep Solomon. Providing the amused, avuncular voice of real-life American Mercury editor H.L. Mencken, Arturoıs benefactor and deity, is real-life critic Richard Schickel.
Towne and Deschanel never lose sight of Los Angeles as a naive, impermanent interloper, most dramatically in an earthquake sequence full of buckling pavement and crumbling buildings. The South African landscape is an evocative if not an accurate substitute (there's nary a Joshua Tree in sight). Dennis Gassner's production design and Albert Wolsky's costumes re-create the period with fittingly subdued detail, as does the music of Ramin Djawadi and Heitor Pereira.
ASK THE DUST
Paramount Classics
in association with Capitol Films a Cruise/Wagner, VIP Medienfonds 3, Ascendant production
Credits:
Director-screenwriter: Robert Towne
Based on the novel by: John Fante
Producers: Tom Cruise, Paula Wagner, Don Granger, Jonas McCord
Executive producers: Redmond Morris, Mark Roemmich, David Selvan, Andreas Schmid, Andy Grosch, Chris Roberts
Director of photography: Caleb Deschanel
Production designer: Dennis Gassner
Music: Ramin Djawadi, Heitor Pereira
Co-producers: Galit Hakmon McCord, Kia Jam, Andreas Schmid
Costume designer: Albert Wolsky
Editor: Robert K. Lambert
Cast:
Arturo Bandini: Colin Farrell
Camilla Lopez: Salma Hayek
Hellfrick: Donald Sutherland
Eileen Atkins
Vera Rivkin: Idina Menzel
Sammy: Justin Kirk
Solomon: Jeremy Crutchley
Voice of Mencken: Richard Schickel
MPAA rating R
Running time --117 minutes...
The world premiere of Robert Towne's "Ask the Dust" will open the 21st Santa Barbara International Film Festival. "Thank You for Smoking", the directorial debut of local Jason Reitman, will close out the festival, which runs Feb. 2-12. "Dust", starring Salma Hayek and Colin Ferrell, is an adaptation of John Fante's Depression-era novel. "Smoking" is a satire on the smoking industry starring Aaron Eckhart, Maria Bello, Katie Holmes, Adam Brody and Robert Duvall. The SBIFF will offer 20 world premieres and 11 U.S. premieres, as well as its "Conversations With ..". series, which offers a dialogue with filmmakers and actors. Towne, Bello and Felicity Huffman are slated to participate, with more to be announced.
For the second time this year, DreamWorks has backed out of a co-distribution deal with Paramount Pictures. After lengthy talks to back Robert Towne's Ask the Dust, an adaptation of John Fante's Depression-era novel with Colin Farrell and Salma Hayek, the studio was unable to close a deal, according to Variety. Instead, Paramount will handle distribution in the U.S. and as-yet-unnamed international territories. Back in March, DreamWorks eased away from a deal to co-distribute Elizabethtown, Cameron Crowe's upcoming ensemble comedy; Paramount now has exclusive North American rights to the picture. It's worth noting that both pictures are Cruise/Wagner Productions. Meanwhile, DreamWorks and Paramount are still in league on three upcoming films: The Stepford Wives, Collateral and Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events.
- 5/3/2004
- IMDbPro News
Colin Farrell has finally bit the dust. Variety reports that the Irish heartthrob, along with 2 Fast 2 Furious babe Eva Mendes, has signed on to star in Robert Towne's Ask the Dust, an adaptation of John Fante's 1939 novel. The romantic drama of two immigrants whose pursuit of the American dream leads them to LA . and each other . is expected to be Farrell's next film after Alexander, which starts shooting this summer. Paula Wagner and Tom Cruise are expected to produce alongside Jonas McCord; Wagner and Cruise produced Towne's last film, Without Limits. A studio deal is expected shortly.
- 6/27/2003
- IMDbPro News
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