Quills_News3

Nov 10

http://www.aint-it-cool-news.com/display.cgi?id=7390

And here he is with a film I'm dying to see... QUILLS... take it away ya thug.......
I saw QUILLS the day after I sat through the safety and comfort of BAGGER VANCE. What a difference a day makes! Now we enter the dangerous perversion of QUILLS, an account of the final days of the Marquis de Sade. Put aside your memories of MARAT/SADE; this is a whole new beast.
The always great Geoffrey Rush (SHINE) is France's most notorious teller of lewd and bloody tales lewd, who spent his final days in a mental hospital run by the church (in the form of Abbott Coulmier played very well by Joaquin Phoenix, who continues to amaze me with his range). Despite being locked up, he is afforded many luxuries because of his status as one of the most well-read authors in the nation. He is allowed visitors and has exceptional living conditions. But most importantly to him, he is allowed to write. And thanks to the help of a chambermaid, Madeleine (Kate Winslet), his manuscripts are smuggled out and published almost instantaneously. When word reaches Napoleon that this expert in perversion is getting filthy rich in this manner, he sends the noted Dr. Royer-Collard (the exquisitely evil Michael Caine). While Coulmier uses kinder, more religion-based methods of treating his patients, the fine doctor essentially tortures the mentally ill into submission.
Director Philip Kaufman is in his element here, lingering on words and descriptions of acts that border on obscene. But rather than show us all of these acts (we do see some), we are often treated to simply hearing the voice of Geoffrey Rush reading from several of de Sade's more famous passages. Kaufman has previously directed such films as THE UNBEARABLE LIGHTNESS OF BEING, HENRY & JUNE, and THE RIGHT STUFF, as well as the excellent 1978 remake of INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS. As in those films, he is unflinching here and lets his actors and situations get so out of hand as to almost threaten to jump off the screen are wring your scrawny little neck.
The performances border on the overblown at times and the direction might turn some people off toward the end, especially with the excessive violence (actually the end of this film reminded me a lot of the end of REQUIEM FOR A DREAM), but writer Doug Wright (on whose play this film was based) keeps the actors on track with sharp and biting dialogue. Many of the words sting like sleet on your face. Every character here possesses some deviant qualities, which Kaufman exploits and puts on very public display for us to examine and judge. Michael Caine steals every scene he's in and his relationship with his 16-year-old bride is slimy and comes has an appropriate resolution. Winslet's role more or less holds things together as she acts as a go-between for the three males leads, some of whom lust after her because it is expected of them (de Sade) or because it's not expected of them (Coulmier).
QUILLS is sick fun and an acting tour-de-force. France never looked like so much fun. The film opens in mid-December I think.

Nov 24
''Quills' Takes on Marquis de Sade

By MATT WOLF
.c The Associated Press

The urge to write courses through ``Quills,'' but the question hanging over Philip Kaufman's film is whether a mass audience has the urge - or the sensibilities - to watch a reasonably fearless movie about the Marquis de Sade.
Say that name and innumerable horrors come to mind, some of which Kaufman's movie examines and others of which it ignores. But what viewers take away from his audacious and beautifully made film is not its chronicle of degradation but its portrait of a man driven by the ``quill,'' or pen.
By film's end, Geoffrey Rush's marquis has been stripped of virtually everything, and still he won't be silenced - even if that means scrawling his musings on life in excrement on the walls of the asylum to which he has been consigned.
Does that make him Antichrist or genius? Perhaps some of both.
Without such men, ``Quills'' suggests, the world is a weaker place, even if certain passages in the film demand a viewer with a decidedly strong stomach. It's de Sade, after all, who gave the world the term ``sadism.''
Kaufman adapted the film - his first since ``Rising Sun'' several years back - from an off-Broadway play by Doug Wright, a Yale graduate who premiered ``Quills'' in 1995 in part to comment on a censorial present. For the marquis, think an 18th-century Robert Mapplethorpe or Andres Serrano.
It's amazing how trenchantly the debates in Wright's excellent screenplay traverse the centuries. One minute, you're admiring the marquis for ``merely hold(ing) up a mirror'' to a debased and depraved world. But can't the same character just as easily be seen as the cleverest of malcontents - a visionary given to images not so much iconoclastic as grotesque?
``Quills'' doesn't take either side, beyond insisting on freedom of speech.
In an odd way, if there is any equivalent to the marquis in recent mainstream American movies, it's the Hustler publisher at the heart of ``The People vs. Larry Flynt.'' There, as here, is a take-no-prisoners anti-hero.
``Quills'' begins in Paris in 1794, its first sounds - appropriately enough - those of heavy breathing. At first glance, life doesn't seem that rough for the marquis inside the asylum he calls home.
A laundress, Madeleine (Kate Winslet), is on hand to act as confidante and eventually more, while the marquis continues to give vent to what he calls an involuntary urge to write.
At heart, ``Quills'' is about the struggle for de Sade's soul, waged between a man of God, Abbe Coulmier (Joaquin Phoenix), and a man of science, Dr. Royer-Collard (Michael Caine).
Without giving too much away, it can be said that rape, for the marquis, means being deprived of his quills, which is just one of the indignities he will endure.
But to sit in judgment on the marquis is, to some degree, to be affected by him. The Abbe, as it happens, is not immune from the lust that fuels de Sade's stories, just as Royer-Collard can be seen embodying the bestial instincts that drive the marquis on.
The material benefits from a top-rank cast that fleshes out what could merely seem an exercise in philosophy; the specifics of ``Quills'' could be far more salacious than they are.
Playing the antithesis to the kindly abortion doctor that brought him an Oscar in ``The Cider House Rules,'' Caine cuts a fearful, mean-eyed figure, advocating a ``cure'' for the very man he would like to see killed.
Recovering from a descent into camp in ``Gladiator,'' Phoenix makes an admirable foil, even if it's not his fault the Abbe suffers from perhaps the film's most questionable sequence.
Winslet yet again is a ripe, warm presence confronted with the ``predator turned prey'' that is the marquis.
And as Rush wryly sums up his character's fate, the audience may feel unexpected sympathy for a notorious figure made unsentimentally noble.
``Quills'' is a 20th Century Fox release of a Fox Searchlight Picture. Running 120 minutes, it has - unsurprisingly - been rated R (for strong sexual content including dialogue, violence and language).