I was in a hair styling salon yesterday (9.29) and, for the first time in a fairly long while, actually sat in a chair and read recent issues of
People,
Us, the
Star and
In Touch cover-to-cover. We all know they're essentially the same rag aimed at a not-terribly-bright female readership. (I worked as an in-house freelancer for
People...
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posted by Jeffrey Wells at 10:54 AM on Thursday, September 30, 2004
I take back my theory about
Team America: World Police creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker possibly being closet righties -- they're a couple of proclaimed Republicans and KY Jelly Bush bitches. In 2.3.01 news story written by E Online's
Emily Farache about their then-controversial Comedy Central series
That's My Bush...
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posted by Jeffrey Wells at 8:35 AM on Thursday, September 30, 2004
"Life's hard...but it's a lot harder if you're stupid." -- spoken by Steven Keats' "Jackie Brown" character in The Friends of Eddie Coyle ('73), reading from Paul Monash's script which was based on the novel by George V. Higgins.
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 8:03 AM on Thursday, September 30, 2004
"There's a revolution going on," the legendary cinematographer Christopher Doyle (
Hero,
The Quiet American) tells the
Guardian's
Zoe Cox, "and the world's changed. Kids these days have so much visual experience they don't think in literary or narrative terms. They're constantly online or playing computer games or fiddling with their phones. These things may not be sophisticated, but they are realigning the parameters of visual experience. It's almost like the death of the talkies."
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 7:19 AM on Thursday, September 30, 2004
I'm somewhat surprised to say that Charles Shyer's
Alfie (Paramount, 10.22), a remake of the 1966 Michael Caine original, is a sure hit, a likely Oscar contender and (did I forget to say this?) a very fine film -- touching, truthful, emotionally supple. The Oscar part of the equation certainly includes a Best Actor nomination for Jude Law. His performance as a smoothly charming womanizer (a limousine driver in present-day Manhattan) is more shaded and varied than Caine's, and gets deeper and more affecting as it moves along.
Alfie...
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posted by Jeffrey Wells at 1:12 AM on Thursday, September 30, 2004
Update
The column is supposed to be completed and up on Wednesdays and Friday mornings, and today (10.1) it's not. Again. My work load has tripled since Hollywood Elsewhere launched in August, and I haven't figured how to work faster or better. I've been trying to wash and dry some clothes this week, and it's taken me three or four days so far -- they're still down in the laundry room. The column will be up around noon.
Right On
...
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posted by Jeffrey Wells at 4:28 PM on Wednesday, September 29, 2004
Nikke Finke reports in her latest
L.A. Weekly column that CBS, NBC and ABC all refused
Fahrenheit 9/11 DVD advertising during any news programming segments. The three networks "said explicitly they were reluctant because of the closeness of the release to the election." Finke's conclusion: "So here is Big Media doing yet another favor for Dubya."
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 2:07 PM on Wednesday, September 29, 2004
A Love Song for Bobby Long, which will close out the Hollywood Film Festival on 10.17, won't be distributed by Screen Gems, which financed/produced, but Lions Gate Films, which recently acquired it. The 119-minute film was reportedly dubbed "Bobby Way Too Long" by critics after it showed at the Venice Film Festival. A relationship drama about the history between a daughter (Scarlett Johansson) and her recently-deceased mother (Debra Kara Unger), it will hit screens sometime in December. Directed and written by Shaine Gabel, it costars John Travolta as Unger's alcoholic ex-lover.
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 9:34 AM on Wednesday, September 29, 2004
Couldn't agree more with Newsweek's "singled out" salute to I Heart Huckabees costar Mark Wahlberg (page 58, 10.4 issue) for his hyper-drive performance as a fireman answering the call of a four-alarm spiritual quest inside his own head. "Who knew Wahlberg could be so funny?," the David Ansen item asks. "He's an unhousebroken hoot."
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 7:49 AM on Wednesday, September 29, 2004
Two stand-out elements in Jake Brooks' New York Observer piece about David O. Russell's friendship with Columbia professor and Tibetan scholar Robert Thurman, "the primary inspiration for Dustin Hoffman's character in the audacious and philosophically dense I Heart Huckabees (10.1). One, a decision by Brooks' editor to put the film-title word "Heart" in brackets. (Hello...?) And two, this comment from Russell: "A monk once said, 'If you're not laughing, you're not in on the joke.' That's why, to me, it's not contradictory to have comedy together with these [mystical, meditative, what's-it-all-about?] questions. Investigating what you are is an absurd proposition."
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 7:23 AM on Wednesday, September 29, 2004
"I played a part in a movie, wore cowboy duds and galloped down the road," writes Bob Dylan in
Newsweek's excerpt from his forthcoming autobiography, "Chronicles, Volume One" (Simon and Schuster). He's talking about his performance as "Alias" in Sam Peckinpah's
Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid...
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posted by Jeffrey Wells at 11:12 PM on Tuesday, September 28, 2004
MCN columnist David Poland's recent take on the presumed potency of Mike Nichols' potentially Oscar-worthy
Closer (Columbia, 12.3) has been, I have to admit, one of his more astute calls. The fact that it's said to play "a little cold" is an indication, he believes, that producers of other presumed Oscar-calibre films are a bit scared of it. "When people start lining up to smear a film this early, that film has some power," he wrote earlier this week. "And that is why bad buzz can be a good sign." My own view is that the Patrick Marber play it's based upon
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posted by Jeffrey Wells at 8:43 AM on Tuesday, September 28, 2004
Will "security moms" be watching the first Presidential Debate on Thursday evening? Or have they pretty much made up their minds at this stage? The reason Bush is said to be leading in the polls right now is that these hinterland-residing, marginally educated swing voters (i.e., family women who are deeply concerned about domestic terrorism) believe Dubya will be studlier and more sheriff-y in preventing the next 9.11. But of course, if a perverse determination had been made by a sitting U.S. President to try and deliberately
provoke...
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posted by Jeffrey Wells at 8:05 AM on Tuesday, September 28, 2004
Correction on that earlier item about the authors of the new Rob Reiner-authorized script of Rumor Has it, the currently rolling not-really-a-Graduate sequel with Jennifer Aniston, Kevin Costner, Mark Ruffalo and Shirley Maclaine. The revisions on a recent draft are credited to Reiner, Andy Scheinman and Adam Scheinman. (I wrote earlier that actor Andy Scheinman was "apparently" a co-writer.) Valerie Breiman is also credited as a co-writer.
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 8:56 PM on Monday, September 27, 2004
An extra-deluxe DVD package containing the 251-minute extended version DVD of Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, due 12.14, will be sold with "a special set of specially-tanned leather restraining straps, two pairs of Clockwork Orange-style eyelid inhibitors, and a large bottle of generic eye drops," according to an alleged copy of a forthcoming New Line Home Entertainment press release. The non-extra-deluxe package will have a suggested retail price of about $40.
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 8:03 PM on Monday, September 27, 2004
Peter Chelsom's
Shall We Dance? (Miramax, 10.15) is not a Richard Gere-Jennifer Lopez romance-on-a-dance-floor movie. It's a Chelsom-esque ensemble piece a la
Hear My Song. It's Gere, Stanley Tucci, Lisa Ann Walter,
The Station Agent's Bobby Cannavale, Anita Gillette, Richard Jenkins...they're all in it together. Lopez plays an intriguing but essentially support-level character for the first hour...no character deepening, no romantic intrigues with Gere,
nothing. Then she and Gere start paying attention to each other at the start of the second hour...but they don't become the movie. (Was her screen time reduced, as it was in
Jersey Girl...
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posted by Jeffrey Wells at 1:08 PM on Sunday, September 26, 2004
Can anyone see the logic in Miramax publicists restricting invites to press screenings of Shall We Dance? in the face of a massive sneak preview showing in theatres coast to coast last night (i.e., Saturday, 9.25)? Especially considering that the film is frequently heartening and spirit-lifting and is obviously going to win over the just-entertain-us crowd? It may not have critics doing cartwheels, but I'm a hard-ass and I had very few problems with it.
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 11:00 AM on Sunday, September 26, 2004
The latest title of that currently filming not-really-a-sequel-to-
The Graduate romantic comedy under director Rob Reiner is (drum roll...)
Rumor Has It. (Not a bad title. It was previously called
Otherwise Engaged, which I also like.) As soon as he was hired in mid-August to replace director Ted Griffin on the Jennifer Aniston-Kevin Costner-Mark Ruffalo film, Reiner brought in
North co-writer Andrew Scheinman to do a page-one rewrite of Griffin's script. Scheinman, producer of several Reiner-directed films from
The Sure Thing ('85) to
Ghosts of Mississippi...
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posted by Jeffrey Wells at 9:32 AM on Sunday, September 26, 2004
Legendary words from Alec Baldwin....seriously: "Movie marketers are taking actors and they're kind of inserting them like suppositories into the cavities of the moviegoing public. The business is so kind of self-referential now. There's a whole kind of industry now about the forensics of the business, so to speak, that wasn't there 20 years ago." So what's a site like Hollywood Elsewhere in this rear equation? Not a lubricant...that's E.T., People, Entertainment Weekly, etc. I don't think I'm even wearing the plastic gloves.
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 3:53 PM on Saturday, September 25, 2004
Any talented 20-something web designers out there living on a trust fund with a little extra time on their hands? Two regular columns a week plus WIRED every day plus editing the other columnists plus assembling each page with jpegs and whatnot...I'm losing it. This isn't whining -- it's fact. You could be from Botswana...I just need some help.
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 3:38 PM on Saturday, September 25, 2004
The first words...the first sound...in I Heart Huckabees is a rapid-fire obscenity spew from the mouth of Jason Schwartzman. It's brash, funny...sets the tone. But it was probably borrowed. John Malkovich's character in the original 1987 Circle Rep production of Lanford Wilson's Burn This made his entrance with the very same bit. Did David O. Russell (then 29 years old) ever catch a performance?
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 3:09 PM on Saturday, September 25, 2004
Critical reactions to
The Motorcycle Diaries have been mostly admiring (like mine), but the political legacy of the real-life Che Guevara is taking bites here and there.
Daily News critic Bob Strauss complains that it's "a feel-good movie about a guy who helped to establish the Castro dictatorship in Cuba, for which he killed many and ordered the executions of many more." And
Salon...
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posted by Jeffrey Wells at 2:28 PM on Saturday, September 25, 2004
Masked Man
I forgot a likely development when I made some forecasts about '04 Best Picture Oscar nominations a couple of days ago. I guess I didn't want to consider it.
Almost every year there has to be one semi-awful, vaguely embarrassing Best Picture nominee. You know...a flick that people like me tend to despise or worse but the Academy tends to (a) emotionally support despite overwhelming taste considerations to the contrary and (b) is more than willing to risk tarnishing the Academy's reputation in history books by actually giving it the Best Picture Oscar.
I'm talking about nominees like Chicago, Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 11:05 AM on Friday, September 24, 2004
George Butler's Going Upriver: The Long War of John Kerry (ThinkFilm, opening soon) "brings to the surface a Kerry I didn't know existed: charismatic, idealistic, eloquent. {So] who turned this brave leader in to a Stepford candidate?" writes critic B. Ruby Rich. "Activist groups like MoveOn.org could do worse than buy airtime to show Kerry's historic testimony in front of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, a passionate attack on failed foreign policies and warmongering. Yeah, just the kind of speech he ought to deliver now in 2004."
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 11:29 PM on Thursday, September 23, 2004
There's been a bit of a
Huckabees dust-up in reaction to Sharon Waxman's friendly-but-unflattering David O. Russell profile in last Sunday's
New York Times. The beef on the part of two
Huckabees cast members I spoke to on Wednesday evening is essentially this: the dynamic between directors and actors during a shoot amounts to a special insiders-only thing with its own particular self-enclosed rules, and that it's hard for a visiting journalist to understand this special camaraderie as fully and clearly as the filmmakers do. Hence Sharon's overly matter-of-fact
Huckabee's...
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posted by Jeffrey Wells at 1:47 PM on Thursday, September 23, 2004
The relentless energy coming off Michael Moore's site (www.michaelmoore.com) is truly intoxicating right now, and is almost enough to dispel lamentable notions that Kerry has so hopelessly cocked things up that Bush has the election in the bag. Moore isn't having any of this defeatist crap. His 9.20.04 message ("Put Away Your Hankies") says, in part, "Enough doomsaying! Bush
is...
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posted by Jeffrey Wells at 1:31 PM on Thursday, September 23, 2004
Shaun Bites
If only the second two-thirds of
Shaun of the Dead (opening 9.24) were as good as the first third...
The geeks calling this thing a way cool horror-comedy are deluding themselves. The threat element is shit and the story tension goes south around the 35-minute mark. You can't just say "it's a spoof" and leave it at that because spoofs have rules. They've got to show the same levels of propulsion and credibility that the films they're spoofing have, or the game falls apart.
I got into this briefly in a WIRED item, but the Shaun...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 1:12 PM on Wednesday, September 22, 2004
Topher Grace (
Traffic,
Win a Date with Tad Hamilton!) has delivered his first exceptionally skillful, star-level turn in a quality film. It's on view in Dylan Kidd's
P.S....
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posted by Jeffrey Wells at 9:28 AM on Wednesday, September 22, 2004
This is strictly an L.A. deal, but Maureen Dowd will be at the Skirball Center on Thursday, September 23, to chat about her book Bushworld with New York Times colleague Alessandra Stanley. Writers Bloc is organzing the event. It'll start at 7:30 p.m.
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 9:24 AM on Wednesday, September 22, 2004
Oops...sorry. My earlier WIRED line about "L.A. Times TV writer Carina Chocano taking Manohla Dargis's slot as second-string film critic under Kenny Turan" was wrong. I'm not clear what Chocano's position is, but Dargis was never Kenny's second. She was explicitly hired as a lead critic (as she subsequently was for her current slot with the New York Times), and equal in position to Turan.
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 7:49 AM on Wednesday, September 22, 2004
I love the startling use of a seemingly honest appraisal in Warner Bros. distribution president Dan Fellman's statement last Monday to
Variety's Michael Fleming about why the release date of Oliver Stone's
Alexander is being bumped from November 5th to November 24th. "We took a good look at the movie in rough form," said Fellman, "and
if it's not the best film he's ever directed, it's close." [Italics mine.] A more typical distribution-chief statement would be something along the lines of "it's awesome...I think it's his best work ever." Instead, Fellman is saying
Alexander...
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posted by Jeffrey Wells at 6:35 AM on Wednesday, September 22, 2004
L.A. Times reporter Robert Welkos has written an anecdotal piecemeal story about Marlon Brando's last days and how his family intends to make money (tastefully and respectfully, of course) off his image and legacy. For some reason it was run on the front page of Wednesday's
L.A. Times print edition, and not in the more customary
Calendar...
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posted by Jeffrey Wells at 6:00 AM on Wednesday, September 22, 2004
Nobody wants to go back to Hogwarts ever again, but Mike Newell's
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire is set there, and the one after that,
Harry Potter and the Order of the Pheonix...
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posted by Jeffrey Wells at 11:16 PM on Tuesday, September 21, 2004
Time to grab that hitching post with both hands and bend over...with feeling. Ang Lee's
Brokeback Mountain...
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posted by Jeffrey Wells at 9:42 AM on Tuesday, September 21, 2004
USA Today's Susan Wloszyna reports that the long-awaited filming of
The Fantastic Four, based on the Marvel comic about three guys and a girl who acquire special powers after "getting caught in a cosmic storm in outer space," is underway in Vancouver. The stars are Chris Evans (
Cellular) as the Human Torch, Ioan Gruffudd (
King Arthur) as Mr. Fantastic, Jessica Alba (TV's
Dark Angel) as Sue Storm and Michael Chiklis (
The Shield) as the Thing. The director is Tim Story (
Barbershop...
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posted by Jeffrey Wells at 9:35 AM on Tuesday, September 21, 2004
The must-see reputation of that romantic zombie comedy
Shaun of the Dead (opening 9.24) is a bit overblown, I regret to say. The first third has delicious wit and invention, but the second two-thirds don't sustain this. The Ain't-It-Coolers have been far too obsequious in kissing this movie's ass. Director/co-writer Edgar Wright and writing partner Simon Pegg's script is about two London slacker-somethings in their late 20s dealing with an onslaught of flesh-eating ghouls. The problem is that the zombies aren't theatening enough. They walk and react way too slowly, so no live humans are in any kind of serious jeopardy (well,
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posted by Jeffrey Wells at 8:50 AM on Monday, September 20, 2004
Open call to those interested in sending in VISITORS submissions: in typical fashion, I've allowed my haphazard work habits to affect my editing duties, and so I've mislaid at least one interesting submission and possibly two. Please send them in again, and to anyone considering sending in something fresh, please do!
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 8:12 AM on Monday, September 20, 2004
False alarms have been sounded before, but Woody Allen's
Melinda and Melinda (Fox Searchlight) has struck at least one critic (
Screen Daily...
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posted by Jeffrey Wells at 8:07 AM on Monday, September 20, 2004
I've heard a little something about Mike Nichols'
Closer...
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posted by Jeffrey Wells at 1:36 PM on Sunday, September 19, 2004
New York Times reporter Sharon Waxman is said to be an admirer of
I Heart Huckabees writer-director David O. Russell, but her portrait of him in Sunday's Arts and Leisure section (9.19) didn't do him any favors. A diary-like observation of what Russell went through during the
Huckabees...
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posted by Jeffrey Wells at 1:21 PM on Sunday, September 19, 2004
Imagine sitting in a theatre and laughing in a half-chuckling, half-hysterical way. And mulling over some basic tenets of eastern mysticism at the same time. And also feeling amazed and throttled by the most relentlessly verbal machine-gun Hollywood comedy since
His Girl Friday. And also doing that outboard-motor thing against your lower lip with your right index and middle fingers and going, "Bee, bee, bee, bee, bee..." To say that I loved
I Heart Huckabee's...
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posted by Jeffrey Wells at 11:56 AM on Saturday, September 18, 2004
Did ya read that Todd McCarthy review of
Shark Tale? Whoa. "The fish aren't fresh," he begins in his Toronto Film Festival review. "It has [recently] seemed all but impossible to miss with underwater cartoon fare, but DreamWorks' latest in-house animated effort finds a way to do just that by basing almost all its ideas on old movies. The odor around this one will result in the wrong kind of b.o. for what was obviously intended as a blockbuster follow-up to the studio's summer smash
Shrek 2...
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posted by Jeffrey Wells at 11:43 AM on Saturday, September 18, 2004
Holy Jersey Girl crack-whore! In that participle-title chart submitted by Pittsburgh reader George Bolanis that ran last Wednesday, George forgot to include two participle flicks that pre-date all the flicks he listed: Killing Zoe (directed by that great Hollywood Wild Man, Roger Avary) and Chasing Amy (directed by my former boss). And this went right by me.
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 11:39 PM on Friday, September 17, 2004
Peter Rainer has been canned as
New York magazine's film critic and replaced by
Entertainment Weekly's Ken Tucker, as mandated by mag's editor-in-chief Adam Moss. Tucker's an excellent writer, but he's not part of the monk's order of sanctified film critics; he's essentially a rock music critic. This hire follows a trend of bringing in non-monks to fill prestige berths, with examples like (a) Richard Roeper taking Gene Siskel's place alongside Roger Ebert, (b)
L.A. Times TV writer Carino Chocano taking Manohla Dargis's slot as second-string film critic under Kenny Turan, and (c) a reported interest among
Chicago TribuneRead More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 11:31 AM on Friday, September 17, 2004
David Poland writes in his Toronto Film Festival capsule review of
P.S., the brand-new film from
Roger Dodger...
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posted by Jeffrey Wells at 8:40 AM on Friday, September 17, 2004
Vintage Sublime
A couple of 40ish guys drive up from L.A. to go on a wine-tasting tour of vineyards north of Santa Barbara for a few days. They get lucky with a couple of local women. The lying they use to get going with these women, not to mention certain character flaws (immaturity, impulsiveness), comes back to bite them, but the truth is faced and modest growth steps are taken.
That, in a nutshell, is Alexander Payne's
Sideways...
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posted by Jeffrey Wells at 11:29 PM on Thursday, September 16, 2004
The Talmud says that the only sin God cannot forgive is despair, according to regular reader Joe Greenia. Even if the Talmud doesn't proclaim this, these are words I should probably think about. Especially considering the latest Harris Interactive poll posted on the Wall Street Journal's website today (Thursday, 9.16), reporting that John Kerry has gotten 48 percent of the intended vote, compared with 47 percent for Bush. (Nader got 2%.) Great, but I'm still pissed at Team Kerry for all their fumbles and hesitations.
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 11:11 AM on Thursday, September 16, 2004
Johnny Ramone is dead at 55 and I'm sorry. A Republican, yes, but 55 is way too young to leave the planet. But don't just hang your head -- go see End of the Century: The Story of the Ramones this weekend and really put your body and your wallet into celebrating one of the 20th Century's greatest rock bands. Johnny himself called it "a very dark movie...accurate...it left me disturbed." And yet it's a film about kicking out the jams until there's nothing left to give, and if that isn't a positive, life-affirming, never-say-die attitude, I don't what would be.
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 10:31 AM on Thursday, September 16, 2004
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 9:57 AM on Thursday, September 16, 2004
The Gloomies
Who can think about movies at a time like this?
The bad guys are probably going to be running things for another four years and I'm supposed to shrug this off and bang out some kind of riff on this weekend's openers -- Wimbledon or Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow or Head in the Clouds?
Okay, let's briefly do that. Except I don't have much to say.
Paramount Pictures publicists let me come to their screenings but they don't go out of their way to invite me either, so I haven't seen Sky Captain...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 11:58 AM on Wednesday, September 15, 2004
Can George Butler's Going Upriver: The Long War of John Kerry make a difference? Answer: Probably not because it's hitting theatres too late in the game. "Will audiences pay to see what amounts to a two-hour political tribute to a man spotlighted free on the news every night?," asks Sharon Waxman in a 9.14 New York Times story. "Can a theatrically released feature film create last-minute momentum for a presidential candidate? Could the effort boomerang?" Bitter answer: Kerry is toast. It's over. Butler's doc, if you care, will open in 200 theaters on 10.1, less than five weeks before the election.
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 8:36 AM on Wednesday, September 15, 2004
A Tuesday New York Post story says Harvey and Bob Weinstein are looking to stay with Disney now that Michael Eisner's agreed to step down (and you can bet he'll be gone well before '06). The brothers are no longer considering splitting up, the Post story reported, and are looking for a way to stay within the fold. Miramax spokesman Matthew Hiltzik told the newspaper that the Weinsteins "remain dedicated to achieving an amicable resolution that will allow Miramax to perpetuate Eisner's legacy, and their own."
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 1:47 PM on Tuesday, September 14, 2004
Val Kilmer will soon begin performing his singing role as Moses in The Ten Commandments, a "spectacular pop stage musical" that "tells the 3,3000 year-old story of Moses' exodus from Egypt and his journey towards happiness, life and rebirth," according to Broadway World.com. (It's apparently based on the DreamWorks animated musical feature.) Moses was happy? The only time Charlton Heston's Moses smiled was when he embraced Anne Baxter. This sounds like horseshit for the tourists. And Kilmer is doing this for...the money?
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 1:22 PM on Tuesday, September 14, 2004
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 9:46 AM on Tuesday, September 14, 2004
You shoulda seen the 20-somethings congregated around Book Soup on the Sunset strip last night (Monday, 9.13) to catch a glimpse of Paris Hilton, who paid a visit to the book store around 7 pm to sign copies of "Confessions of an Heiress: A Tongue-in-Chic Peek Behind the Pose" (Fireside). Men and women were looking to catch a peek through the window on the sidewalk, and a bunch of grungy guys were hanging around with digital cameras in the rear parking lot. Paris Hilton is just a rich ditz; people oohing and aahing her is a disease that really needs to be cured.
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 9:36 AM on Tuesday, September 14, 2004
"September is way too early to declare an Academy Award winner," admits
N.Y. Daily News critic-columnist Jack Matthews, "but the Oscar engraver would do well to remember the spelling of Taylor Hackford's star in the biographical drama
Ray...
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posted by Jeffrey Wells at 8:10 AM on Tuesday, September 14, 2004
Hollywood Elsewhere has a new chat room called "Poet's Corner" -- currently up and running. It's on the navigation bar -- please sign up (or don't sign up... it's your call) and let fly. I've also gone live with the first Dispatches column, which has been written by Shall We Dance? director Peter Chelsom. And come Friday Kim Morgan, former film critic for Willamette Week and The Oregonian and a radio talk-show host for four years, will be be joining the fray with a new column.
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 11:19 AM on Monday, September 13, 2004
So the Bond producers have lowered their sights sufficiently to allow for the hiring of Dougray Scott to play 007? (Whatever the accuracy of this story, it recently acquired the legitimacy of a printed account in London's
Sunday Mirror.) Bond casting has always been about the "it" factor. It's obvious to me that Scott (check him out in
Enigma or Liliana Cavani's
Ripley's Game) almost has it, but not quite. Clive Owen had it in those online BMW "drive" commercials, but "it" seemed to have deserted him when he turned up in
King Arthur...
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posted by Jeffrey Wells at 9:57 AM on Monday, September 13, 2004
Kevin Spacey "absolutely can sing," says Roger Ebert, but Beyond the Sea, Spacey's Toronto-screened biopic of Bobby Darin, "follows a fairly familiar formula." It also "has some problems," he says, "including a strange structure involving Darin as a child commenting on his own adult life, but it also has real qualities, including musical numbers that really deliver. The movie has many songs in it, and Spacey sings them...damned well. It takes nerve to put yourself on the line like that, but he knew what he was doing."
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 8:43 AM on Monday, September 13, 2004
Zap2it editor Michael Syzmanski wrote on his Toronto blog last Saturday (9.11) that Taylor Hackford's Ray, the Ray Charles biopic with Jamie Foxx in the title role, "is the best thing I've seen this weekend. All the rumors about Foxx getting a Best Actor nod at the Academy Awards this year [are] definitely true...the film is probably a contender for Best Picture too." Universal is releasing it on 10.29.
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 3:34 PM on Sunday, September 12, 2004
A friend in Toronto who's been a reliable source on good movies to watch for is telling me to put Terry George's
Hotel Rwanda into the Oscar Balloon as a potential Best Picture nominee. The film is "a sensation," he says. "It's the new generation's
The Killing Fields." The script by George (director of
A Bright Shining Lie, writer of Jim Sheridan's
In The Name of the Father...
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posted by Jeffrey Wells at 3:17 PM on Sunday, September 12, 2004
I'm getting good vibes and a sense of the right pieces coming together from that story about Jim Sheridan's next film, a DreamWorks-funded remake of Akira Kurosawa's classic, deeply touching
Ikiru (1952).
Variety...
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posted by Jeffrey Wells at 1:09 PM on Saturday, September 11, 2004
An early
I Heart Huckabee's review from Toronto sounds encouraging. "Five years after
Three Kings, writer-director David O Russell returns with an absurdist existential comedy that is more idiosyncratic and daring than anything he has made before," writes
Screen Daily's Alan Hunter. "
Huckabees...
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posted by Jeffrey Wells at 11:36 AM on Friday, September 10, 2004
More on
Huckabee's: "It is a considerable tribute to Russell's vision that everything eventually fits into place and makes sense," Hunter declares. "Beneath the apparent anarchy there is actually a strong sense of discipline that prevents the film becoming a folly along the lines of Peter Bogdanovich's
They All Laughed or John Boorman's
Where The Heart Is...
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posted by Jeffrey Wells at 11:28 AM on Friday, September 10, 2004
Digital Choo-Choo
I'm kind of an undistilled-reality type guy, visually speaking, so don't expect me to cream over the latest animation technique.
I can take or leave Japanese anime (and Japanese anime snobs tick me off). I was never a fool for Disney-style paint-cell animation. I've always liked but never quite loved those bursting colors and needle-sharp detail in those PDI/Pixar-generated features (you know ...Shrek, Shark Tale, etc.) And while I admired those CG compositions in Final Fantasy, they never made me want to jump up and down.
...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 9:57 AM on Friday, September 10, 2004
There seems to be near-unanimous opinion among journos and editors that Marc Forster's
Finding Neverland (Miramax, 11.12) is a very prominent contender for Best Picture honors. Baby, I'm amazed. As big a fan as I was of Forster's
Everything Put Together and especially
Monster's Ball, and as much as I'm looking forward to his next film,
Stay...
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posted by Jeffrey Wells at 4:53 PM on Thursday, September 9, 2004
Two or three weeks ago I nay-nayed Depp's
Neverland performance, and I feel I should run it again since I'm about to retire the
Word...
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posted by Jeffrey Wells at 4:27 PM on Thursday, September 9, 2004
Three comments from those who've recently seen Bill Condon's
Kinsey (Fox Searchlight, 11.12), the story of Alfred Kinsey's pioneering studies of human sexuality in the late '40s and '50s. One, that it's intelligent, absorbing and quite accomplished...although its appeal might be a tad stronger among sophisticated blue-staters than with the red-state mom-and-pop crowd. Two, that the sexual scenes are pronounced enough that some have expressed amazement that it managed to get an R rating. And three, that there's a scene involving sexual intimacy between star Liam Neeson (who plays Kinsey) and costar Peter Sarsgaard that will grab attention.
Kinsey...
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posted by Jeffrey Wells at 3:58 PM on Thursday, September 9, 2004
Oliver Stone's
Alexander opens in less than two months (only eight weeks from Friday, 9.10), and yet no editors or long-lead journalists I've spoken to have seen it or been told about a screening...yet. The historical epic is going through a final editing push, apparently. Warner Bros. executives have seen a version that runs about three hours, I'm told, and they've allegedly asked Stone to tone down the violence in the battle scenes. (When this info was relayed to a small group of journos after Thursday's
Polar Express...
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posted by Jeffrey Wells at 3:25 PM on Thursday, September 9, 2004
A certain eyebrow-raising clip allegedly taken from the forthcoming
Return of the Jedi DVD has already shown up online, but I wasn't sure if it was bogus or not. But
DVD Newsletter editor Doug Pratt has told me it's definitely true: George Lucas has replaced that ghostly image of Sebastian Shaw (the British actor who played Darth Vader/Annakin Skywalker) in the 1983 theatrical version of
Jedi's finale...you know, that sentimental farewell moment in which he's shown standing next to Yoda and Alec Guiness's Obi-wan Kenobi?...with a ghostly image of Hayden Christensen, who of course played Annakin in
...
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posted by Jeffrey Wells at 9:43 AM on Thursday, September 9, 2004
The
Guardian has reported that Jonathan Glazer's
Birth...
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posted by Jeffrey Wells at 9:33 AM on Thursday, September 9, 2004
That "vaguely bothersome echo" in Walter Salles' beautifully rendered
The Motorcycle Diaries -- i.e., the dramatizing of young Che Guevara's growing compassion for the downtrodden without dealing with the severe and murderous fruit of this compassion that manifested after Guevara came to power in Cuba with fellow revolutionary Fidel Castro -- has struck an adverse chord with at least a couple of major-league critics. If other journos pick up on this (and I have no knowledge that this view is widely shared),
Diaries...
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posted by Jeffrey Wells at 8:40 AM on Thursday, September 9, 2004
Variety reporter Ben Fritz's story about a deal between Howard Stern and Movielink, the internet video-on-demand outfit, to sell access to uncensored clips of nude or topless women visiting Stern's radio show studio, is interesting enough. But the online version of this story has a more interesting headline: "Movieline, Stern offer uncut antics." This will probably be fixed by the time you read this, but it gave me a bit of a start. Movieline publisher Anne Volokh pacting with Stern to show nudie footage? Especially with Movieline having long ago renamed itself Hollywood Life? Ahh, well...
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 8:20 AM on Thursday, September 9, 2004
Just for clarity's sake, Alejandro Amenabar's undeniably touching right-to-die drama with the Oscar-calibre Javier Bardem performance is called....wait a minute, I'm not sure. The Spanish title, Mar Adentro, translates as Out to Sea, but that wasn't used because it had already been taken by a 1997 Jack Lemmon film. So New Line Cinema, the distributor, announced a new title: The Sea Within. Then they changed their minds (or were forced to reconsider) yet again, and now it's called The Sea Inside. Which, of course, shoudn't be confused with Lions Gate's Bobby Darin biopic Beyond the Sea...
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 11:02 AM on Wednesday, September 8, 2004
"I'm off to catch
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban one last time on the big screen before it dons its celluloid invisibility cape and disappears for good." So declared the extremely bright, super-knowledgable
L.A. Weekly critic Scott Foundas in last week's issue. Whew....whatever. As intriguing as Alfonso Cuaron's influences were upon
Azkaban...
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posted by Jeffrey Wells at 10:31 AM on Wednesday, September 8, 2004
Good to hear that Alexander Payne's Sideways, which my friends at Fox Searchlight have agreed to let me see early next week, is a winner, or is perhaps even, as David Poland declares, "the first true masterpiece of 2004." At the very least I look forward to savoring the four main performances by Paul Giamatti, Virginia Madsen, Sandra Oh and Thomas Haden-Church. But the use of the word "masterpiece" scares me a bit. A wait-and-see attitude seems prudent.
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 2:19 AM on Wednesday, September 8, 2004
The truth is that Wired is the new Word column, and I can already tell after writing it for a couple of days that I'm going to refresh it a lot more often, while I haven't added a new item to the Word in a couple of weeks now. So the hell with it. Off with the Word 's head, I say...but what to put in its place?
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 2:02 AM on Wednesday, September 8, 2004
Guns and Roses
There's a vaguely bothersome echo in Walter Salles' The Motorcycle Diaries (Focus Features, 9.24) that nobody in Hollywood journalist circles seems to want to talk about...but it's there.
It doesn't trouble me to any great degree, although it's grown into a slight roadblock in terms of my core feelings about the lead character, Ernesto "Che" Guevara, who is wonderfully played by Gael Garcia Bernal.
The echo I'm speaking of certainly has no place in Diaries...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 9:34 PM on Tuesday, September 7, 2004
An angry letter written two or three weeks ago by Steven Spielberg, George Lucas and Martin Scorcese to Sony vice-chairman Jeff Blake is apparently the main reason why a widescreen (2.35 to 1) DVD of Sydney Pollack's
Castle Keep is being issued so quickly on the heels of that condemned pan-and-scan version that came out 7.20. Apparently Blake passed along the Lucas-Spielberg-Scorsese letter (which "raised hell" about the
Castle Keep...
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posted by Jeffrey Wells at 2:20 PM on Tuesday, September 7, 2004
There's this item (which may or may not be accurate) that Tom Cruise may earn $100 million or more from a revenue-sharing deal in exchange for starring in Steven Spielberg's War of the Worlds. Why does this make me feel less interested in seeing the film, and maybe even a little turned off about it? Because the notion of that much money paid to an actor for his agreeing to run around and hyperventilate and dodge Martian death rays is grotesque. Why are you doing it, Tom? How much better can you eat? What can you buy that you can't already afford?
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 1:38 PM on Tuesday, September 7, 2004
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 11:14 AM on Tuesday, September 7, 2004
A thought passed along by Variety film critic Robert Koehler, quoting Paris cinephile/critic/programmer Nicole Brenez: "The more important a film is, the less it is seen." Mull that one over...
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 6:43 AM on Tuesday, September 7, 2004
Fox Searchlight's
Napoleon Dynamite, a low-budgeter aimed at 25-and-unders, was facing a bit of a touch-and-go situation at first, but it caught on and may actually hit the $40 million mark before running out of steam. Sundance know-it-alls were predicting marginal business last January, and it clearly hadn't enchanted the over-40s I spoke to back then...but kids made it into a quasi-phenomenon. Things weren't looking all that fantastic at first for
Open Water...
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posted by Jeffrey Wells at 11:31 PM on Monday, September 6, 2004
A recent watching of the DVD of George Lucas's
THX 1138, out 9.14 following a limited theatrical break on Friday, came as a bit of a surprise. For decades I've been calling this Lucas's finest film as well as an indication of an intriguing path he might have followed if he hadn't hit it big with
Star Wars, and it still
is that, I suppose. But it no longer cuts through. Where it once seemed darkly prophetic or at least stylistically striking,
THX 1138...
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posted by Jeffrey Wells at 11:02 PM on Monday, September 6, 2004
Fahrenheit 9/11 may get nominated for a Best Picture Oscar (or not), but director Michael Moore has decided against submitting it as a Best Feature Documentary hopeful. Hoping to turn as many swing voters against President Bush as possible, Moore has declared on his website he'd like his film to be shown on broadcast TV before the election, even though he admits that
Fahrenheit 9/11...
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posted by Jeffrey Wells at 10:43 PM on Monday, September 6, 2004
L.A. Weekly columnist Nikki Finke's disturbingly funny
take...
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posted by Jeffrey Wells at 6:13 PM on Monday, September 6, 2004
Nothing terribly new about Laura Holson's
report about the ongoing negotiations between Disney and Harvey Weinstein. Just the same stories that have been rumbling around for the past few weeks, etc.
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 10:32 PM on Sunday, September 5, 2004
Strange that this didn't pop up earlier, but
EW critic Owen Gleiberman's
remark in last week's issue about how Jonathan Demme's
The Manchurian Candidate should have concluded is brilliant. If
Candidate "had been a truly audacious update of the original, [Demme] would have shown the government sectretly in league with al-Queada."
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 10:19 PM on Sunday, September 5, 2004
Stop Rhys Ifans
I want to put this carefully so as not to be misinterpreted. I'm trying to formulate what I consider to be a modest and temperate industry initiative. The unmalicious goal is the total termination of acting jobs given to Rhys Ifans, the downmarket, stubble-faced tall guy with dirty-blonde 1971 hippy hair who, in his movie roles, is often given to beatific expressions and saying lines in such a way as to produce vague mystifications.
...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 9:36 AM on Sunday, September 5, 2004
