1930's-1950's The Moon's Our Home (Seiter, 1936) Sh! The Octopus (McGann, 1937) The Mating Season (Leisen, 1951) Bad for Each Other (Rapper, 1953) The Phenix City Story (Karlson, 1955) Run of the Arrow (Fuller, 1956) House of Secrets (Green, 1956) Saint Joan (Preminger, 1957) Macabre (Castle, 1958) The Fiend Who Walked the West (G. Douglas, 1958 Five Gates to Hell (Clavell, 1959) 1960's Key Witness (Karlson, 1960) Summer and Smoke (Glenville, 1961) The Chapman Report (Cukor,1962) Bachelor Flat (Tashlin, 1962) [on Hulu] The L Shaped Room (Forbes, 1963) The Chalk Garden (Neame, 1964) A Thousand Clowns (Coe, 1965) You're a Big Boy Now (Coppola, 1966) The Whisperers (Forbes, 1967) Dark of the Sun (Cardiff, 1968) Skidoo (Preminger, 1968) Last Summer (Perry, 1969) The Comic (C. Reiner, 1969) 1970-1974 The Revolutionary (Williams, 1970) The Landlord (Ashby, 1970) Diary of a Mad Housewife (Perry, 1970) Tropic of Cancer (Strick, 1970) I Never Sang for My Father (Cates, 1970) Sometimes a Great Notion (Newman, 1971) Marriage of a Young Stockbroker (Turman, 1971) 'Doc' (Perry, 1971) The Music Lovers (Russell, 1971) Drive, He Said (Nicholson, 1971) The Steagle (Sylbert, 1971) The Last Movie (Hopper, 1971) Made For Each Other (Bean, 1971) The Day the Clown Cried (Lewis, 1972) Hickey & Boggs (Culp, 1972) The Carey Treatment (Edwards, 1972) Pete 'n' Tillie (Ritt, 1972) Slither (Zieff, 1973) Love and Pain and the Whole Damn Thing (Pakula, 1973) Man on a Swing (Perry, 1974) Open Season (Collinson, 1974) The Tamarind Seed (Edwards, 1974) Law and Disorder (Passer, 1974) Homebodies (Yust, 1974) Stardust (Apted, 1974) Celine and Julie Go Boating (Rivette, 1974) 1975-1979 Rafferty and the Gold Dust Twins (Richards, 1975 At Long Last Love (Bogdanovich, 1975) Hearts of the West (Zieff, 1975) Welcome to L.A. (Rudolph, 1976) W.C. Fields and Me (Hiller, 1976) Citizens Band (Demme, 1977) Twilight's Last Gleaming (Aldrich, 1977) Looking for Mr. Goodbar (Brooks, 1977) Girlfriends (Weill, 1978) Movie Movie (Donen, 1978) The Medusa Touch (Gold, 1978) American Hot Wax (Mutrux, 1978) Hot Stuff (DeLuise, 1979) Scavenger Hunt (Schultz , 1979) Players (Harvey, 1979) Rich Kids (Young, 1979) Nightwing (Hiller, 1979) Screams of a Winter's Night (Wilson, 1979 When You Comin' Back Red Ryder? (Katselas, 1979 1980's Resurrection (Petrie, 1980) The Awakening (Newell, 1980) Simon (Brickman, 1980) God's Angry Man (Herzog, 1980) Fast-Walking (Harris, 1982) Twice Upon a Time (Korty & Swenson, 1983) Trouble in Mind (Rudolph, 1985) When the Wind Blows (Murikami, 1986) Housekeeping (Forsyth, 1987) The Glass Menagerie (Newman, 1987) Patty Hearst (Schrader, 1988) Running on Empty (Lumet, 1988) Drowning by Numbers (Greenaway, 1988) Haunted Summer (Passer, 1988) The Decline of Western Civilization Part II: The Metal Years (Spheeris, 1988) 1990's Men Don't Leave (Brickman, 1990) Old Times (Curtis, 1991) Prospero's Books (Greenaway, 1991) City of Hope (Sayles, 1991) The Baby of Macon (Greenaway, 1993) King of the Hill (Soderbergh, 1993) Dadetown (Hexter, 1995) SubUrbia (Linklater, 1997)
So what could have led Roger Michel, the obviously bright and perceptive director of Enduring Love, to take Ian McEwan's 1998 novel about a bizarre romantic obsession and turn it into a "jokeless gloomarama?" wonders New Yorker critic Anthony Lane. "The ideas behind Enduring Love may be fascinating, but they don't play, they sulk, and so it was during another annoying rant from Jed the Pest [i.e., Rhys Ifans' thoroughly revolting stalker character] that I leaned over to the friend beside me and whispered, 'All I really, really want at this moment, in the whole world, is to be watching Dodgeball."
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 2:04 PM on Sunday, October 31, 2004
In Tom Wolfe's scheme of things, reports a New York Times Magazine profile (11.31), social behavior is almost always determined by status consciousness -- an instinct to preserve your place in the social pecking order. Pretty much all human endeavor "has to do with status," says the 74 year-old author of "I Am Charlotte Simmons" (excerpted in Rolling Stone, in book stores November 9). "Or STATE-us, which is the way you say it if you want more status." Our status awareness is so fundamental, Wolfe says, that "there may even be a specific place in the brain that creates it," the article relates....Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 11:58 AM on Sunday, October 31, 2004
Two days before the election, and there's a definite downshift thing going on. Can you feel it? Whatever's going to happen is going to happen, and that's that. (Save for the last-minute lurches of the fence-sitters, of course...but they'll never know who they are or what they really believe.) A lot of readers are telling me they're sick of the whole thing and can't wait, etc. I for one am ready and willing to get back into all-movies, all-the-time...unless there's a Florida-style recount debacle-muddle of some kind. It's clearly time to get our priorities straight and ask when exactly will the Farrelly's make...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 10:22 AM on Sunday, October 31, 2004
Follow-up to my 10.27 item (see below): Wired magazine made the same call I did about not capitalizng the words "internet" or "web" two months ago. Is this clearly understood? I hope so. "Effective with this sentence, Wired News will no longer capitalize the 'I' in internet," editor Tony Long wrote on 8.16. "At the same time, Web becomes web and Net becomes net. True believers are fond of capitalizing words, whether they be marketers or political junkies or, in this case, techies. If It's Capitalized, It Must Be Important. [But] the simple answer is because there is no earthly reason to capitalize...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 4:06 PM on Saturday, October 30, 2004
An anonymous "Black Man, Husband, Father, Son, Actor, Producer, Director, Poet, Warrior," et. al. who wrote in to Movie City News a day or so ago says he's sick of a lot things in movies today, with all-around mediocrity among the offenders. One things that stick in his craw is Halle Berry's role in Monster's Ball," a single mother who falls for the great white racist white man WHO PUT HER HUSBAND AND FATHER OF HER CHILD TO DEATH." Okay, except Billy Bob Thornton's death-row prison guard character (i.e., Berry's love interest) isn't a "great racist white man" -- he's a middle-aged cog...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 11:20 AM on Saturday, October 30, 2004
I predicted this a few weeks ago, and now it's coming to pass: Joel Schumacher's The Phantom of the Opera (Warner Bros., 12.22) is making its way, buzz-wise, into the Best Picture Oscar race.
This lavishly produced (I'm told) musical, which almost no one has seen but is based, as everyone knows, on the popular Andrew Lloyd Webber stage musical, has become a big Best Picture "maybe" largely due to a story written by New York Times reporter Sharon Waxman that ran yesterday (10.28).
"You know it's going to be a strange year for the...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 3:18 PM on Friday, October 29, 2004
The breeze is now blowing in John Kerry's direction. Can you feel it? I can. The tightening of the national poll numbers, the strengthening of the looted weapons depot in Iraq story by eyewitnesses and video footage, the just-announced FBI investigation into Halliburton contracts, etc. The breeze was blowing for Bush a week, week and a half ago....but now it's not.
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 9:31 AM on Friday, October 29, 2004
Vincent, Tom Cruise's hit-man character in Collateral, is diamond-like -- hard and sharp and full of glints and reflections. For me it's a hot-cold thing...acting that burns through not because of some forced intensity, but an artful hold-back, cold-steel strategy.
Cruise, never much for passivity, wants a Best Actor nomination for this tour de force. He's not out of line. His Vincent is a monster and a cripple, but at the same time a kind of tough-love therapist. By the end of the film he's saved the life of Jamie Foxx's procrastinating Max as surely as if he'd taken a bullet for...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 5:17 PM on Wednesday, October 27, 2004
Some day, somehow, major-publication editors are going to give up and start spelling the word "internet" without that fucking capital "I." However you want to define the worldwide web -- an environment, a digital information delivery system, an intergalactic atmosphere -- "internet" is a generic term like "highway" or "radio" or "television." I got into the same kind of idiotic dispute with a writer at the Hollywood Reporter in the early '80s who insisted that every time a mention was made of CDs that they be referred to as "Compact Disks." (Or was it "Discs"?) I argued that this was like insisting that...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 8:11 AM on Wednesday, October 27, 2004
New York magazine critic Peter RainerÃs review of Alexander Payne's Sideways is, to me, really quite beautiful. An exquisitely cut stone. Fully in tune with the film itself. IÃd like to see Ken Tucker, RainerÃs recently-hired replacement, write something as good. Perhaps he will. Here's hoping Rainer finds a new berth sometime soon...hopefully a berth with an editor who will respect his talents more than New York editor Adam Moss apparently does.
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 7:41 AM on Wednesday, October 27, 2004
I haven't been invited to see The Polar Express (Warner Bros., 11.10), the $200 million-plus, digitally groundbreaking, Christmas storybook flick made by director Bob Zemeckis and star-producer Tom Hanks, despite being invited to the product-reel, dog-and-pony show at the Warner lot a few weeks ago. I suppose there's a reason for some concern now that Variety's David Rooney has called it The Bi-Polar Express and complained that the story doesn't pay off particularly well. Along with an emerging view that the digitally-composed kids are "dead-eyed" and resemble the alien tykes from Village of the Damned. Plus David Poland declaring that "this thing is...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 8:27 PM on Tuesday, October 26, 2004
Brad Bird's The Incredibles (Disney/Pixar, 11.5)!! This animated comedy about a family of gone-to-seed superhero parents and their two kids, ducking their enemies under the Witness Protection Program but looking to get those old juices flowing again, is looking like a monster hit with all ages. A friend who went to an Academy screening on Monday, 10.25, said, "I loved it...it's funny...people applauded the especially good parts...it runs about 115 minutes but feels like 80 or 90...and it's a crowd-pleaser, a blockbuster...it'll make $200 or $300 million." I could've gone, but I went to the Tom Cruise tribute thing instead. Choices, choices.
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 8:23 PM on Tuesday, October 26, 2004
New Yorker critic David Denby on Paul Giamatti's sublime performance in Sideways, from a 10.18 posting : "Giamatti has no chin to speak of, a round-shouldered physique, an adenoidal snarl, and the nervous grin of a craven dog. HeÃs the national anti-ideal, and heÃs making a brilliant career out of it. In American Splendor, as the cartoonist Harvey Pekar, he dragged his miseries around the deserted lots and slag heaps of Cleveland [and was] a genuine oddball. Miles is closer to common dreams and chagrins, and in this role Giamatti gives his bravest, most generously humane performance yet. Women may be...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 3:37 PM on Monday, October 25, 2004
There are two words that describe the reported thinking among certain undecided voters out there, as relayed in a New York Times story out today (10.25), and those words are "staggeringly ignorant." Perhaps the better adjective for ignorant is "willfully," since the only way to support Bush in the face of all the damning indicators is to invest in massive levels of denial. The bad guys seem to be inching up, up, up...polls say Kerry is slightly behind in Hawaii, Florida, et. al. The New York Times says support for Bush among black voters is higher than it was in '00....what?? Even the...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 8:33 AM on Monday, October 25, 2004
"Closer is, I suppose, a Carnal Knowledge for 2004," cinematographer Stephen Goldblatt has told San Francisco Chronicle columnist Hugh Hart. "It's obsessed with sexual politics. It's a quite upsetting, very adult drama, and [director] Mike Nichols is a fanatic about reality." Glamour was not a concern. "When it worked dramatically, I wanted Julia Roberts not to look good," he informs. "She was game. For one scene with Clive Owen that was very emotionally raw, she didn't wash her hair, she wore no makeup at all. It was very much about the drama involved, so everything worked from the rehearsals and from the play."
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 8:07 AM on Monday, October 25, 2004
The unfolding Paramount Classics situation boils down to this: (a) as run by co-presidents Ruth Vitale and David Dinerstein over the last six years, the division has been steadily profitable but not overwelmingly so, mainly due to financial-strategy restrictions placed upon Vitale-Dinerstein by former Paramount COO Jonathan Dolgen; (b) with Dolgen out as of last June, Viacom co-prexy Tom Freston has said he wants Par Classics to become a more dynamic, Fox Searchlight-resembling operation, and (c) in line with this, Paramount vice-chairman Rob Friedman is thinking about hiring John Sloss (the New York-based indie sales vet and producerÃs rep), former UA topper Bingham...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 11:19 AM on Sunday, October 24, 2004
It was clear from an early John Logan draft of The Aviator, subsequently shot by director Martin Scorsese and the film now awaiting a Warner Bros. release on 12.17, that the resounding love affair in the piece isn't between Howard Hughes and a woman (Cate Blanchett's Katharine Hepburn, Kate Beckinsdale's Ava Gardner, et. al.) but between Hughes and his flying machines. The longish film (a recent cut ran around 165 minutes) is also, apparently, buoyantly free of glumness or heavy-osity. "I know enough about it to say it is escapism, certainly for Scorsese," says industry tipster Pete Hammond. "That doesn't mean it's comedy,...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 10:37 AM on Sunday, October 24, 2004
"The challenge of taking on esteemed material has evidently inspired Alfie director [Charles] Shyer to shake off the bland and bloodless polish of his ultra-mainstream Hollywood pictures to inject this remake with welcome vitality," writes Variety critic Todd McCarthy. "Shyer employs a jumpy, quick-cutting style he's never used before. He also gets the dynamics among the characters right, is generous to his actors (all the actresses come off very nicely indeed) and guides Jude Law to an entirely engaging performance that does not so much compete with Caine's as comfortably co-exist alongside it at a nearly four-decade remove. Many men meeting an Alfie...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 10:21 AM on Sunday, October 24, 2004
Take this with a very small grain, but remarks from a couple of actresses have upped my interest in Clint Eastwood's Million Dollar Baby (Warner Bros., 12.15).
Paul Haggis's script is a surrogate father-surrogate daughter relationship piece. It's about an aged ex-prize fighter (Eastwood) who decides to train a young woman (Hilary Swank) who's determined to box. Morgan Freeman plays Eastwood's longtime pal and confidante...the character with the pithy sayings and sage ringside commentary.
Haggis's script is said to be based upon two short stories from the novel "Rope Burns," by F.X. Toole. The plot has always sounded to me...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 6:50 PM on Friday, October 22, 2004
Roman Polanski, your legend is about to be challenged. Before shooting Washington, the third and final installment of his Amerika trilogy, Lars von Trier is going to make some kind of classy horror film about the Devil. To be called Antikrist, it will ìput an end to the big lie that God created the world,î according to von TrierÃs producer, Peter Aalbek Jensen, and will explore von Trier's contrarian view that ìit was Satan who created the human race and the world.î ThereÃs no script yet apparently, but according to a story in the Danish daily Berlingske Tidende , the plan...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 8:55 AM on Thursday, October 21, 2004
The fundamental yea-nay on Oliver Stone's Alexander (Warner Bros., 11.25) will hinge, I'm guessing, on one basic thing.
Has Stone sufficiently channeled the times of Alexander -- the beliefs and core values that provided a sense of identity, cohesion and destiny to players in the period from 356 to 334 B.C.? Has Stone sufficiently imbedded his film in the bedrock faiths and realities of that time and culture?
And in so doing (that's if he's accomplished this), has Stone resisted inevitable studio pressures that he (a) reimagine Alexander's life so it unfolds in...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 3:06 PM on Wednesday, October 20, 2004
From Bill Maher's "New Rules" routine on last Friday's (19.15) "Real Time with Bill Maher" HBO show, to wit: "New Rule: No puppet fucking. The South Park guys have a new movie called Team America, which features graphic sex scenes between marionettes. Hey, you know what? If I had any interest in wooden sex with strings attached, I'd get married."
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 9:04 AM on Wednesday, October 20, 2004
Natalie Portman's striptease-club scene in Closer will, I'm told, be cause for hormonal excitation among younger males, particularly those who haven't seen her in Garden State (in which she gives a wonderfully ripe and robust performance)and who know her primarily as Princess Amidala. I don't know what I can add to this, except to say that strip clubs are very exciting places to be for about five minutes...until that rancid predatory vibe starts to seep into your pores and you can't wait to leave. But those first five minutes are great.
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 8:54 AM on Wednesday, October 20, 2004
Another totally detestable movie idea being developed by Joe Roth's Revolution Studios: a Beatles film musical called "All You Need Is Love," currently being written by Brit screenwriters Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais. Pic would use well over a dozen cover versions of Beatle songs to "drive the narative" of a love story between an English lad and an American lassie, set against the backdrop of the social upheaval of the 1960s. If this thing ever gets made, it could one day share the marquee of West Hollywood's New Beverly cinema with Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Heart Club Band.
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 6:25 PM on Tuesday, October 19, 2004
If you buy what some Democratic pulse-takers are saying, the election is closer than it seems because the historical record is that the vast majority of undecided voters have always gone for the challenger at the last minute. I'd like to believe this, but with an apparent majority of red-staters still preferring Bush in every poll except the most recent New York Times and Zogby surveys, my gut is giving me that old sinking feeling again. I also suspect that TV news media types believe it's in their interest to push the scenario that it's still a neck-and-neck race...even if the bottom-line indications...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 1:44 PM on Tuesday, October 19, 2004
There was an early-bird press screening of Wes Anderson's The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (Touchstone, 12.25) last Monday evening (10.18), and one reasonably discerning guy who attended says he "loved it....I was laughing hysterically...it was a real rush...my heart and mind were completely in synch over it." This from a guy, F.Y.I., who liked Anderson's first three films -- Bottle Rocket, Rushmore, The Royal Tenenbaums -- but didn't quite love them.
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 1:31 PM on Tuesday, October 19, 2004
In her role as Tea Leoni's mother in James L. Brooks' Spanglish (Columbia, 12.17), Cloris Leachman has all the great hilarious-obnoxious lines, I'm hearing, and generally knocks it out of the park. "She has all the classic Brooks lines...lines that turn in on themselves," this guy is saying. "You know, like 'sometimes having low self-esteem just shows good sense'?" I guess this means Leachman could be one of the five Best Supporting Actress contenders, as mothers with sharp tongues always seem to strike a special chord with people. And to think...Jane Fonda wanted this role for her big comeback vehicle, and she auditioned...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 11:59 AM on Tuesday, October 19, 2004
Nothing further on Matt Stone and Trey Parker's political sympathies needs to be said, but here's New York Times critic Tony Scott riffing on them anyway: "A number of commentators have discerned a pronounced conservative streak amid the anarchy of South Park, a hypothesis that Team America to some extent confirms. Susan Sarandon, Tim Robbins and other left-leaning movie stars are eviscerated (quite literally -- also decapitated, set on fire and eaten by house cats), while right-wing media figures escape derision altogether. It seems likely that [Stone and Parker's] emphases and omissions reflect a particular point of view."
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 4:05 PM on Saturday, October 16, 2004
It was George Bush '41, not President Bush, who was quoted Friday as having called Michael Moore a "total ass" and "slimeball" for pushing "outrageous...lies about my family" in Fahrenheit 9/11.
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 11:33 AM on Saturday, October 16, 2004
A reader named Mark Zeigler says he's having doubts about my enthusiasm for Sideways (Fox Searchlight, 10.22) because Salon critic Charles Taylor has mostly panned it and called its director-cowriter, Alexander Payne, "a pretentious wiseass." First, it's okay for Taylor to trash Sideways. He's going to feel pretty lonely with that viewpoint, but fine. But second, Zeigler may want to consider what New York Times critic Manohla Dargis has said about the criticism that Payne treats his characters with condescension, which she calls "a puzzling assessment." She adds that "it's hard to understand the genesis of this discomfort" except to note that "like...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 11:13 AM on Saturday, October 16, 2004
Howard Stern said yesterday morning (Friday, 10.15) that Chris Rock's hosting of the Oscars Awards will be a "disaster." What he really meant to predict is that Rock will fizzle like David Letterman did. Funny and brilliant as Rock may be, Stern feels he's too much of an irreverent grenade-tosser to be a hit with the Academy crowd, which takes the Oscars half-seriously and wants more respect and affection from Oscar emcees than Rock is willing or able to provide. I think Stern is wrong, and that Rock will be hilarious -- he always is -- and that people recognize the Oscar show...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 10:03 AM on Saturday, October 16, 2004
Figuring the specific reason iNDEMAND decided to bail on airing "The Michael Moore Pre-Election Special" will be an interesting pursuit. The company, owned by Time Warner, Cox and Comcast cable companies, announced Friday it wouldn't be showing "The Michael Moore Pre-Election Special" due to "legitimate business and legal concerns," which is apparently a euphemism for political pressure. Moore has stated that he and iNDEMAND signed a contract to air the special (which would have included a showing of Fahrenheit 9/11) in early September, and that he believes that pressure from "top Republican people" caused the turnaround. Moore is considering taking legal action against...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 8:39 AM on Saturday, October 16, 2004
The arrival of Gillo Pontecorvo's The Battle of Algiers on a Criterion DVD last Tuesday is one of the most fascinating historical echo events in a long time.
A nearly 40 year-old account of guerilla warfare waged by the Algerian Liberation Front against French colonialists on native soil in the late 1950s, Pontecorvo's astonishing film is a primer on what U.S. forces are grappling with now in Iraq.
If the movie itself doesn't make this clear, there's a 25 minute featurette on the DVD's third disc that spells it out further. Former anti-terrorism official Richard Clarke, the tough-minded guy who...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 10:18 AM on Friday, October 15, 2004
Trey Parker and Matt Stone are clever filmmakers and inspired comedians, but I can't help despising where they're coming from politically in Team America: World Police (Paramount, 10.15), their R-rated puppet flick.
I'd love to fall in line with my journo friends and call them the cat's meow in all respects, but man, I can't. Matt and Trey are in league with the bad guys, or at the very least doing what they can to undermine the legitimate and (hello...?) insightful convictions of the anti-Bush lefties everywhere, so no offense but leaving aside the fact that they're a couple of...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 3:29 PM on Wednesday, October 13, 2004
Some of you might be tempted to look at Jeannot Szwarc's Somewhere in Time in tribute to Christopher Reeve, who gave one of his better performances in it. I happen to be a sucker for this film, not for the "all" of it but because of a closing sequence that I saw at critics' screening some 24 years ago....but which I haven't seen since. I asked about this when I happened to run into Somewhere in TimeÃs cinematographer Isadore Mankofsky a few months ago at the Newport Beach Film Festival. I told him how much I admired this final sequence -- a longish,...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 10:26 AM on Wednesday, October 13, 2004
Anyone looking at Wes Anderson's upcoming The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (Touchstone, 12.25) and saying it's not Oscar material....as a fairly well-connected journalist friend suggested last weekend...is missing the point. Wes Anderson films are about their own state of mind and nothing further. They simply are, and the crowd doesn't have stand up and throw their hats into the air for this cosmic fact to be legitimized. The peculiar psychology of a typical Anderson character is mother's milk for X-factor types, but has always been a bit too skewed in a brainy Glass-family sense for mainstream audiences. And Anderson's low-key, unforced sense...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 7:21 AM on Wednesday, October 13, 2004
I'm watching the Rock (a.k.a., Dwayne Johnson) talk about shooting a bizarre action scene in The Rundown in which he and Sean William Scott were hanging upside down in the jungle while being attacked by monkeys. He's talking about the physical and psychological stress of shooting this bit, and I'm surprised because I'd assumed the monkeys were CG, and maybe even that Johnson and Scott's upside-down position was also created on a hard drive. CG effects have become so widespread and passe that none of us believe there's any kind of taken-from-real-life reality to any kind of action scene in movies today. Everythg...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 11:58 AM on Tuesday, October 12, 2004
For me, Richard Eyre's Stage Beauty is a so-so, hit-and-miss thing, and the most glaring error is the casting of Billy Crudup as a kind of lady. He plays a 17th Century London stage actor named Ned Kynaston, whose was renowned in the early stages of his career for playing female roles (since women were forbidden to play women in those days). The diarist Samuel Pepys called Kynaston "the most beautiful woman on the London stage," except that Crudup's sharp nose and jutting chin make him look pointedly un-feminine or at the least unattractive by any sort of hot-girl standard. If I were...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 10:08 AM on Monday, October 11, 2004
Certain taste-maker journos around town are telling me Dylan Kidd's P.S. (Newmarket, 10.15) isn't good enough and therefore that Laura Linney's shot at a Best Actress nom for her work in this film is in peril. I really think they're wrong about this. This obviously smart, curiously romantic film is alive and originally plotted, it never drifts or bores, and Linney is radiantly readable in every frame.
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 9:20 AM on Monday, October 11, 2004
Christopher Reeve was a symbol of undying hope, fortitude and courage. What did he die of exactly? A New York Times story said that Reeve fell into a coma Saturday after going into cardiac arrest while at his home in Pound Ridge, New York. Reeve "was being treated for a pressure wound, a common complication for people in wheelchairs," the Times story explained, adding that "these wounds result from constant pressure in one spot, reducing the blood to that area and finally killing the affected tissue." Reeve had been suffering from a pressure-wound infection which had spread through his body, which eventually brought...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 9:59 PM on Sunday, October 10, 2004
Sorry I dropped out for three days, but I had a mild neurological freakout on Friday morning. In plainer terms, I kind of, heh-heh, "lost it" and thereafter decided on some primal deep-down level that I needed to re-charge for a day or two. Sorry -- I'll try not to let it happen again. Do I really mean that? Sure I do...as far as it goes.
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 9:53 PM on Sunday, October 10, 2004
It's built into our genes to show obeisance before power. It's obviously a big tendency in Hollywood circles, but hardly an exclusive one. Every culture, every species does the bow-down.
I was speaking the other night to this know-it-all guy who goes to a lot of Academy screenings and parties, and we were talking about possible Best Actor nominees. We'd both just seen Ray and knew for sure Jamie Foxx was a shoo-in, but who else?
"Paul Giamatti," I said.
"Who?" he asked.
"The lead in Sideways," I reminded him. "He's amazing, heartbreaking... and...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 9:18 AM on Friday, October 8, 2004
I admired and enjoyed Bill Condon's Kinsey (Fox Searchlight, 11.12) upon seeing it Monday night. It's a smart, probing, movingly performed portrait of what it was like to live in sexually suppressed times, and how a startling work of research by an gangly odd-duck scientist named Alfred Kinsey (Liam Neeson) began to lift the cloak of sexual puritanism.
I've just made it sound like one of those plodding, dutiful, good-for-you biopics. It's not. It's alert and focused and keeps you thinking and re-thinking.
Neeson hasn't been this concentrated and affecting since Schindler's List (and this time without...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 5:52 PM on Wednesday, October 6, 2004
In a piece honoring the recently deceased Janet Leigh, L.A. Times critic Carina Chocano says in today's edition (10.5) that Leigh's best films -- Touch of Evil, Psycho and The Manchurian Candidate -- amounted to "a dark trilogy, [in which she played] an icy, un-settling and alienated woman, a cynically tragic ur-feminist." I'd leave room for a fourth character in this vein: the embittered ex-wife of Paul Newman's down-at-the-heels shamus in Jack Smight's Harper (1966), which boasted a finely-tuned script by William Goldman. The angry and wounded Susan Harper was surely a more substantial part than Leigh's bizarre Candidate character, Eugenie Rose, who...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 3:38 PM on Tuesday, October 5, 2004
After nine submissions, the MPAA ratings board has finally given Matt Parker and Trey Stone's political satire Team America: World Police (Paramount, 10.15) an R rating. The org had been threatening to label the Scott Rudin-produced film with an NC-17 rating over a simulated oral-sex scene between puppets. The board had presumably been adamant about this because any puppet movie will presumably attract a good number of minors, but of course it can't be legally seen by minors with an R or NC-17 rating, so what are they on about? Do they think in this day and age that any 12 or 13...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 3:12 PM on Tuesday, October 5, 2004
The perception that Kerry won last week's debate has wiped out President Bush's lead in the race, according to the latest Newsweek poll. In the first national telephone survey following last Thursday's debate, the newsweekly found that the race is now statistically tied among registered voters, with 47 per cent favoring Kerry vs. 45 per cent for Bush. All this means is that swing voters are total jellyfish. They all tumbled for Bush after the well-produced macho swagger of the Republican convention, giving him an 8 to 10-point lead, and then Kerry "wins" the debate and they all swing in the other direction...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 3:43 PM on Sunday, October 3, 2004
29 year-old Leonardo DiCaprio's performance as Howard Hughes in The Aviator (Warner Bros., 12.17) is "stunning," producer Michael Mann has told Empire magazine. "Particularly in the second half, when he's playing an older Hughes. He's pheonomenal. It's a really excellent piece of work." A draft of John Logan's script that I read in '02 strongly suggests that the $100 million biopic won't be about Hughes' romantic dalliances with Kate Hepburn, Ava Garner and Jean Harlow as much as his passionate devotion to the task of making machines do things the world's never seen before. Director Martin Scorsese may well deliver a beautifully made...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 3:03 PM on Sunday, October 3, 2004
So Shark Tale did just shy of $50 million on its first weekend...big deal. A movie can be a box-office leviathan and people can still hate it. Everyone says it's mainly about other movies, it's got no heart, and the only good voice-actor performance is Martin Scorsese's. Last May I attended a big DreamWorks presentation for Shark Tale at the Cannes Film Festival (footage, luncheon, and personal appearances by Will Smith, Jack Black and Angelina Jolie) As DreamWorks honcho Jeffrey Katzenberg introduced the footage he called it "a movie with heart." Heart was precisely the missing component in the footage they showed, and...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 2:50 PM on Sunday, October 3, 2004
I'm all over the place this morning (researching, ad concerns, re-designing) and running late with Wednesday's (10.6) column. It probably won't be up until 3 pm Pacific time. If only there two of me...or three of me, for that matter. One could sleep on the couch and the other on a cot in the dining room.
I'm tapping something out about Ray, which I saw last night. Nothing new here, but the rumble is not overblown: Jamie Foxx's performance as Ray Charles totally kills, and is the exact sort of tour de force dazzler that always seems to appeal to Academy...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 2:42 PM on Friday, October 1, 2004
"The most powerful moments are so realistic that they're almost excruciating. A good half dozen sequences are so intensely acted and so deeply involving that audiences will forget they're watching a movie until the scene ends and exhaling can recommence. Yet [the director] knows how to increase the overall effect by interlacing quieter, more tender scenes as well." I'm definitely intrigued by this excerpt from Peter Brunette's review of Crash, the Paul Haggis-directed drama due from Lions Gate in early '05. "One specific scene, involving [Thandie] Newton and [Matt] Dillon at the scene of an accident, is simply unforgettable," Brunete continues. "Music also...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 7:58 AM on Friday, October 1, 2004
The "impartiality" being shown by news channel spinsters in assessing what happened during last night's Presidential debate is slightly odious. Ask anyone on the street and they'll tell you Kerry did much better than Bush. He had it together and attacked with dignity, precision and a crisp delivery style. Bush didn't blow himself up, but (a) he seemed frustrated (i.e., irked by Kerry's criticisms, at times comically), and (b) he seemed slow, primitive of thought and fumbling at times. I don't know if this impression is going to turn things around for Kerry, but he was the clear victor. For some reason (any...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 7:34 AM on Friday, October 1, 2004
