TCM Film Festival 2025 (Day 4)

It feels a little like sundowner syndrome when we arrive at the fourth day of the film festival. Everyone has had a wonderful time for 3 days but we all know that it's about to be over with, even though there are wonderful things still scheduled for the afternoon. Our fourth day at the film festival was really pretty simple, we had two films that we were going to see both of them were pretty long, and then we had the closing night film.

2001 A Space Odyssey

Amanda and I made the decision to split up for the first film of the day, she had never seen "Oklahoma" before and was anxious to catch it on the big screen. And as I've said in other posts, although I love my daughter she has disappointed me in her lack of appreciation for "2001 A Space Odyssey", that's the film I decided that I would go to see. I was especially interested in seeing 2001 again on the big screen, because the guest of the day was going to be the star of the film Keir Dullea. The festival programmers seem to be doing their best to get to important guests while they are still around. Mr Dullea, is maybe the 5th or 6th guest that I saw this weekend who is in their late 80s. All of us are due to leave this Mortal coil at some point, and I'm glad that so many of these guests chose to spend some time with us while they still could.

2001 on the big screen, at the Egyptian, is something I've done several times before. And once again seeing the movie in a theater with a rapt audience is thrilling. We were given the whole effect, including Overture, intermission, and exit music. They have also made sure to make these presentations authentic in another way, they closed the curtains and then open them again when it's time for the feature. To me, the sense of excitement as the curtains part and the credits begin to roll, is one of the things that makes me most love the movies. They should be an event, not just content.

The conversation with Keir Dullea, was quite interesting, including stories about how he was cast and about his working with Stanley Kubrick on the set. His wife accompanied him onto the stage to help keep him focused on particular questions. He was by no means senile, but he would wander off track occasionally or miss the meaning of the question and she assisted him quite ably without necessarily suggesting that there was anything wrong. Especially appreciated the prompt that she had at the end when she reminded him that he wanted to talk about a piece of dialogue that got cut from the film, but for which he had spent a great deal of time trying to memorize, and still has it in his head.

I did an audio recording several parts of the conversation, and I'm going to try to include them here.

Richard Kirkham · Keir Dullea at TCMFF 2025

"2001", along with "Jaws" is on my list of 10 favorite films of all time. So this is a pretty good weekend for me.

Apocalypse Now

When I met up with my daughter after her screening, we were queuing up to get numbers for this 1979 Francis Ford Coppola classic. She had been quite enamored of "Oklahoma", and I hate that I missed sitting through it with her, because I quite like the film. I really enjoyed her embrace of the songs and the story and the joy that she seemed to be having. I was a little worried that this next film would destroy some of the cheerfulness that surrounded the mornings experience for her. After all Apocalypse Now is not a happy film.

I'm not sure how she managed to get to her age without being exposed to this film more. She told me she's only seen a few clips and doesn't really know much about the movie. So that made our decision to see "Apocalypse Now", here at the film festival, really an appropriate one. The guest for this presentation was director Antoine Fuqua who has directed a ton of action films that I have loved over the last 20 years. He had nothing to do with the production of "Apocalypse Now", it just happens that it's his favorite film and inspired him to become a director and make movies that feature kind of grit and action that Coppola provided. His commentary on the film was mostly that of an enamored fan, which is not really a bad thing. It was certainly encouraging to hear his enthusiasm for the movie, as we tried to gird ourselves for the experience.

I mentioned that in the 2001 screening, the festival was trying to create an authentic experience included the ritual with the curtains. For this screening, the authenticity was enhanced by the distribution of a booklet, that contain the credits for the film. Back in 1979, the premier screening of this movie it Cannes, was done without any credits appearing on the screen, but rather in a Nifty little pocketbook with pictures. That item was reproduced and provided to all of us who attended this Sunday afternoon screening of a decidedly depressing War film.

There are variations of "Apocalypse Now" that have become quite popular in the last few years, but this presentation was the original theatrical cut. That's the only version of the film that I know. I've seen the film occasionally over the years, and I have bounced back and forth between disliking it and embracing it. Whenever I think of the distaste I might have had for the movie, it probably reflects the negativity that is such a huge part of the story. 

This time I was happy to embrace the film, and I was glad that Amanda was suitably impressed with it as well. Now if only I could get her to respond to 2001 the same way maybe I wouldn't feel like such a failure as a father.

Heat

The closing night film for the festival was Heat, in the TCL IMAX theater. We had originally planned on watching the silent version of Beau Jeste in the Egyptian Theater. When actor Al Pacino was added to the discussion of "Heat", we changed our minds and decided we could not miss out on the opportunity to hear one of the great actors of the 20th century talk about this movie.

The original guest was Michael Mann the director of the film, and Pacino joining him made the discussion feel a lot more complete. In fact even though there were questions, the situation felt more like a conversation with two old friends on the couch rather than an interview. Each of them remembered some things slightly differently, and they occasionally made the effort to correct a misstatement or a difference in memory.

Now I do have a confession to make, we chose not to stay for the screening of the film after the conversation. We had watched Heat last year and Amanda was not up for repeating it. It is a long film, and if we had stayed we wouldn't have gotten home until midnight at least. So we stayed for the conversation between Pacino and director Michael Mann, and then we made our way out of the theater is quietly as possible so that we can return to the Southern California house and my daughter and her husband are living in. We got to have dinner with them instead of sending down in the diner with Robert De Niro and Al Pacino.

Ferrari

 

Director Michael Mann Returns to the big screen with a biopic about Enzo Ferrari, the founder of the sports car company. This was a film that was highly anticipated and one that I had looked forward to a great deal. I've admired some of Mann's other films a lot, including “Last of the Mohicans” and "Manhunter”, two terrific films from nearly three decades ago. But like many of the directors who have come back to the screen this year the results were decidedly mixed.

The subject matter should be fascinating for people who are excited about cars. I'm not a huge racing fan but I have appreciated several movies in recent years that featured car racing as their main subject. Both “Rush” and "Ford versus Ferrari" were entertaining films and they made my best of the Year film list. Heck I even liked “Speed Racer”. The problem I had with this film is that it is less about racing and cars than it is about Ferrari and his love life. Although there is supposed to be a duality in his commitment to his wife and his mistress which is then mirrored by his desire to be successful on the racetrack and to achieve financial stability for his company. That parallel does not sustain itself very long in the movie. The domestic drama overtakes the racing issues and shoves them off stage.

Adam Driver has been made up to look older, thinner and more Italian so that he can play Ferrari. For the most part he seems adequate in the role, although most of the time his voice is low-key and he sometimes mumbles his words. Although his accent seems reasonably accurate, as is often the case when dialect and sounds are being used to convey a language rather than the words themselves, it is sometimes difficult to understand what is being said. It might as well have been in Italian to begin with.

There is a plot line about the financial instability of the Ferrari company in the 1957 timeline in which the movie is set. That story never gets completely explained once it has been set up. The idea that winning the Big Race at the end of the film will result in sales of automobiles that will be significant enough to rescue the company from its financial cliff needs to be Illustrated for us to both understand and care. But the script and the director have decided that once they've explained it in a piece of dialogue, there is no need to elaborate further. This means that the stakes of the race don't seem as significant and important as they should be. Heck, there are no scenes in which the participants go over the cars, except after an accident.

The race scenes themselves are pretty exciting although there are times when it was difficult to understand what was going on. For example in the major race that it caps the film, there are five drivers for the Ferrari team, and they all drive the red Ferrari Color cars. It seems however that some of the Maserati cars are also red, and because the drivers are wearing helmets and goggles it is often difficult to tell which car it is we are looking at at any given moment. In fact it was not until the end of the scene that I realized that a driver who had lost his car and had to get a ride from one of the Ferrari drivers was in fact driving a Maserati rather than being a member of the Ferrari team. A point like that is very confusing when you are at the climax of a film.

It seemed to me that the whole point of the film was to highlight two spectacular crashes that occurred and were turning points in Ferrari’s story. I'm not sure that we needed to see the crashes in the spectacular detail that is provided by the film. However the one crash that occurs close to the end of the film is devastating to watch and of course that means that it is quite dramatic. Unfortunately the car crashes are the only dramatic things that seemed to happen in the story. Confirming the ugly belief that the real reason people watch these kinds of races is to see the crashes. I suspect that the real reason people will see this movie is to watch these scenes. Not a very pretty thought.

Enzo is supposed to be torn between Penelope Cruz who plays his wife and Shailene Woodley who is his mistress. Neither of them is given very much to do in the film, and we barely know their characters at all. Woodley especially is underutilized, with only a brief flashback to explain how she and Ferrari got together, and that appears to be the extent of their 12-year relationship. With Cruz it was a little bit clearer that there were elements of the marriage that were important to these characters, but that does not really get used in the story except in one scene where it is made clear that an incident in the family's past is responsible for most of the division between Ferrari and his wife. This could have been a rich vein of drama to explore, but it simply gets used as a plot point to give a short hand for why the couple's marriage is on the rocks and why the wife resents the mistress, even though she seems accepting of the infidelity.

This is a good film but it is not a great movie and the reason is that the script does little to engage us. Frankly there's so many scenes that go on far too long that I was often slightly bored. That's not something that should be happening in a movie where car racing is involved. I could recommend the film to people by saying it is a reasonable biopic about the man, but not about the legend of the car. And I think for most audiences they have very little interest in the man without also being interested in the car. So the movie is simply imbalanced.