If The Shoe Fits
The plot of Ridley Scott's Kingdom of Heaven (20th Century Fox, 5.6) is on the complex side, but if you let yourself think plain like Tom Joad and avoid getting smeared with your own intellectual whipped cream, it all boils down nicely.
Aside from the upscale distinction of being a Ridley Scott film in the big-canvas Gladiator mode, Heaven is a 12th Century armies-on-horseback movie about Eastern vs. Western forces. You know...one of those Muslim vs. Christian, olive-skinned natives vs. white-guy invader type deals, taking place during the Crusades and set in war-torn Jerusalem.
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 11:09 AM on Wednesday, December 29, 2004
Popcorn Shards
A guy said this to me (if not in this precise sequence) the other day. He knows this town and how it's been evolving, etc. And in a moment of despair...
"It was going to be Deliverance in the Gobi desert. The script was about character with everyone slowly going insane as the days went on, and when the new plane was built the pilot is reluctant to fly it because the desert crash was his fault and his confidence is shot.
"And he couldn't be Mel Gibson. If it was Gibson you'd want to see him do it. You'd be...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 2:09 PM on Tuesday, December 28, 2004
An interesting theory has surfaced as to why
Slate's David Edelstein,
Salon's Charles Taylor and
New York Press critic Armond White all hate Clint Eastwood's
Million Dollar Baby. Ready? They're all Paulettes -- i.e., disciples of the late, legendary film critic Pauline Kael -- and Kael had a case against Eastwood in her day, and her acolytes have continued to occasionally channel her from the grave. Kael was four-square against Eastwood's early films. She famously called
Dirty Harry a "fascist" movie, and while Eastwood didn't direct that film, the label stuck. There's some juicy stuff in Richard Schickel's Clint Eastwood biography about that...
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posted by Jeffrey Wells at 1:57 PM on Monday, December 27, 2004
A new trailer for Ridley Scott's
Kingdom of Heaven (20th Century Fox, May 6) is up and running, and it seems...well, like a class act, certainly, but also damned familiar. It's
Gladiator again with a sword-and-arrow battle in a shadowed, blue-tinted forest and those same CG snowflakes in the air. It's
Alexander again with a massive army on horseback charging across a dusty desert plain. It's
Troy again with Orlando Bloom, playing Balian of Ibelin, a young blacksmith in Jerusalem, helping to defend his besieged city. Let's hope the Fox marketers can push their way past this, because I want this film to...
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posted by Jeffrey Wells at 6:20 PM on Sunday, December 26, 2004
This has nothing to do with my head space or the concerns of this column, but
New York Daily News columnist Lloyd Drive (a.k.a., "The Lowdown") deserves a round of applause for vowing in his 12.23
column to never again write about Paris Hilton. "If she discovers a cure for cancer, wins the Nobel Peace Prize, launches herself into outer space -- or even gets her high- school diploma -- I'll be happy to revisit the issue," Grove wrote. "But until then, this is the last time you'll see Paris in Lowdown."
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 6:11 PM on Sunday, December 26, 2004
All right, everybody calm down: the $68.5 million earned by Universal's Meet the Fockers since last Wednesday is not an American tragedy. The first weekend is always about marketing, never the film. It's about people being too lazy to read the reviews or, in this instance, to consider Dustin Hoffman's referring to the film as "this thing." (I ran this quote twice.) Always listen to words in passing...they always tell the tale. No one out there loves this film, everyone was disappointed, and it's the big mega-movie of the moment. Ain't that America?
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 11:00 AM on Sunday, December 26, 2004
I have to do something about Discland -- DVD's Are Crack. I've tried to keep up and can't, and I need someone to take this column over. Not contribute -- run it. Each and every week, covering the new DVD's. Get in touch...
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 10:55 AM on Sunday, December 26, 2004
Is Oscar-show producer Gil Cates planning any kind of special tribute to the late Marlon Brando for the 2.27 telecast? You'd think this would be a no-brainer (the guy was easily the most influential and iconic actor of the last 55 plus years) and maybe Cates has decided to do the right thing. But Oscar-show editor extraordinaire Chuck Workman (the fast-montage guy who also directed
A House on a Hill and the brilliant '50s doc
The Source) hadn't been told a thing as of 12.26. Mike Shapiro, the guy who usually cuts the Oscar death-tribute reel, wasn't reachable on Sunday morning (imagine that!)...
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posted by Jeffrey Wells at 9:45 AM on Sunday, December 26, 2004
"'We're all of us sentenced to solitary confinement...inside our own lonely skins for as long as we live in this earth,' muses Val, the drifter Brando [played] in Tennessee Williams' The Fugitive Kind. As a statement of majestic desolation, it seems a fitting epitaph for a man who never quite escaped his own raw presence." -- Daphne Merkin on Brando in the 12.26 New York Times Magazine.
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 9:42 AM on Sunday, December 26, 2004
"What happens now? It's just too early to tell. I'm at a crossroads. And I feel good. I feel like I've got something out of my system. I feel that I achieved a mountain for myself. A mountain. No matter what, I feel very proud of what I've written. I've achieved something I've wanted to achieve all my life. Whether it's understood or not -- maybe there's a degree of mysticism in the movie that's meant to be. And maybe it will be understood better over the years. I'm not sure. But I felt moved. I don't feel the need to do that...
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posted by Jeffrey Wells at 10:21 AM on Saturday, December 25, 2004
Richard Linklater's Before Sunset (Warner Independent) has been named the year's finest film (or the #1 film) by the Village Voice 6th Annual Film Critics Poll. The two-character dialogue piece set in Paris had far and away the highest number of points (564), compared to the 4th place Sideways (381)and the eleventh-place Million Dollar Baby. Great for Linklater, great for his costars Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy...great all around.
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 9:28 PM on Thursday, December 23, 2004
I don't mean to sound like I'm sounding, but an awfully high percentage of the folks queried for the Village Voice Film Critics Poll, although they know their stuff cold and are undeniably brilliant and independent minded...not very many of them seem like average-Joe, salt-of-the-earth, Boston-Red-Sox-fan type guys. Know what I'm saying? A tiny bit snobby and elitist, wouldn't know what to do or say in a working-class bar, pencils up their butt, etc. Dave Kehr and John Anderson are okay, and David Sterrit's got a little Aaron Copeland, fanfare-for-the-common-man in him, but how come Matt Zoller Seitz isn't in the group?
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 9:16 PM on Thursday, December 23, 2004
Hacked Again
For the second time during the Xmas holiday, Hollywood Elsewhere has been hacked. But it'll all be back to normal within hours, maybe only two or three.
For the record, this is being written at 3:06 pm Pacific, on Tuesday, 12.28.04.
The most recent Hollywood Elsewhere column (the one that went up on Friday, 12.24) will be restored and back up by 4 or 5 pm Pacific. The rest of the site, including the proper ads (the currently viewable ads are from our server's last fully-backed up version of the site, dated December 3rd), will be up and rolling in...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 1:56 PM on Wednesday, December 22, 2004
All I want for Christmas is a quality-transfer DVD of The Friends of Eddie Coyle, with any extras they can throw in with it...commentaries, making-of doc, Robert Mitchum interview, anything. That's all I want...and that's not much to ask for.
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 8:20 AM on Wednesday, December 22, 2004
Notice to marketing guys and trailer editors: if you cut together 50 or 60 snips from a film and shoot them out machine-gun style, like 90% of the trailers do these days, you can make a film seem interesting or sexy or whatever. Except this trick has used so often it's not interesting any more. To me, rapid-fire machine-gun cuts in trailers are a coded message that says, "Watch out, this film may have something to hide."
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 1:14 PM on Tuesday, December 21, 2004
There are sad films and depressing films. Sad movies make you hurt in a good way...a basically gloomy feeling that nonetheless doesn't feel oppressive, and comes with an emotional anchor that puts you in touch with some aspect of your past. Depressing movies make you feel like you don't want to feel anything. They make you irritated, skittish, cynical. In short, the final act of Million Dollar Baby isn't depressing but sad. Unless, of course, you're one of those who doesn't distinguish between the two.
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 1:12 PM on Tuesday, December 21, 2004
Everyone's telling me that
Meet the Fockers (Universal, 12.22) is funny, agreeable, harmless, etc. (I missed the all-media screening and my Universal p.r. pals had no other options.) But now Dustin Hoffman's "thing" quote is boomerang-ing back in the from of these two remarks by the
L.A. Weekly's David Chute: (1)
Fockers, he says, is "a big-budget
Dharma & Greg episode with toilet jokes," and (2) "the desperation is occasionally leavened by the charms of the star cast: Robert De Niro, for example, does incredulous disgust better than anyone on Earth, and entire sequences here are choreographed to inspire his slow burn. In...
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posted by Jeffrey Wells at 8:14 AM on Monday, December 20, 2004
It's time to weed out the weaker sisters among the Best Actress candidates, and they are...sorry to say this and I mean no offense...
Vera Drake's Imelda Staunton and
Being Julia's Annette Bening. Staunton gives a two-note performance in that Mike Leigh film -- loving, easygoing Vera before she gets busted, and freaked-out, zombie-like Vera after the bust. Not good enough! Bening is pretty good as the grande dame of the 1938 British stage...okay, very good, but the film is undeniably weak, and Bening is resultantly fading and that's a fact. The topliners are three:
Million Dollar Baby's Hilary Swank,
Eternal Sunshine of the...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 11:55 PM on Sunday, December 19, 2004
The "remains to be seen"
New York Times gremlin has struck again, this time in Charles McGrath's story about boxing movies and applied -- oddly, curiously -- to
Million Dollar Baby , which makes people weep and seems like a sure-fire hit. "Boxing still looms largest as a subject for literary types and for filmmakers paying homage to the past," McGrath comments. "Like
Raging Bull,
Million Dollar Baby may turn out to be an elegy for a kind of movie they almost don't make anymore," adding in another portion of the article that "how this will play with audiences, as opposed...
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posted by Jeffrey Wells at 9:40 AM on Saturday, December 18, 2004
I seem to only write about things I'm seriously excited or angry about in the WIRED space. Well, here's an exception! It's Saturday morning and the holiday shutdown is taking effect as we speak. Time to roll out those evergreen stories and maybe start choosing my picks for Oscar Balloon '05.
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 9:30 AM on Saturday, December 18, 2004
Nutters vs. Nutters
Two days ago I ran a 2004 sum-up piece about the year's best and worst, but I may have spoken too soon. That same day a completely riveting documentary arrived in the mail from Telluride Film Festival director Tom Luddy, who told me the next day that it might be "the most important film of 2004." And he may be right. At least in a political vein.
It's called The Power of Nightmares. It's written and produced by the BBC-funded documentarian Adam Curtis, who also made the brilliant four-hour doc The Century of the Self. I raved about this Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 10:48 AM on Friday, December 17, 2004
My friend Anne Thompson, who has done many favors for me, has been brought aboard The Hollywood Reporter as deputy film editor by her old bro, film editor Gregg Kilday. She officially starts on Jan. 17th. The money is good and she gets medical and dental and why not, right? Reporter cool, job cool, everything cool....maybe even John Travolta's next film, which wasn't written by Scott Frank for reasons I don't need to go into at this time.
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 6:55 PM on Thursday, December 16, 2004
Somehow I missed this quote from Colin Farrell about his costarring with Jamie Foxx in the Michael Mann-scripted and directed
Miami Vice, which will begin shooting in April for Universal. (A friend of a guy I know has been offered a job on the shoot.) Why do another TV adaptation so soon after
S.W.A.T.? "I'd do anything to work with Michael Mann," he answered. "And the script is great. The worst thing about the project is the title, but as a piece in and of itself it's brilliant...[It] goes deep into the undercover world. It's Mann doing his heavy and tough stuff, with...
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posted by Jeffrey Wells at 3:41 PM on Wednesday, December 15, 2004
And I know I asked about getting a look at this before, but does anyone have a copy of Sam Mendes' Jarhead?
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 3:39 PM on Wednesday, December 15, 2004
As Good As It Got
Everyone has been calling '04 a fairly weak year, but this same tune is played every damn December. 2004 may not have been gold bullion, but it was better than okay.
I'll allow that '04 didn't measure up to 1999, the last truly stunning year (VISITORS contributor Steve Coppick made a good case for this in his 9.15 column), but I've just tallied my best and worst films of `04, and the numerical facts are these:
There were not just 10, but 16 2004 features that could be called extremely good. Added to...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 11:34 AM on Wednesday, December 15, 2004
Uma Thurman is arrestingly focused and hard-core in the Kill Bill movies, but I don't quite get her being nominated for Best Dramatic Actress award by both the Hollywood Foreign Press Association and the Broadcast Film Critics Association for her work in Kill Bill, Vol. 2. Just as Truman Capote once said of Jack Kerouac's stream-of-beat-consciousness prose in On The Road, "That's not writing, that's typing!," I would say of Thurman's Bill perfs, "That's not acting, that's martial-arts training!" For the most part, anyway.
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 7:53 AM on Wednesday, December 15, 2004
All but one of the award-calibre lead male performances this year are based on real life guys, but all of the major nominated lead female parts are fictional. Of the six lead male performances nominated his morning (12.15) by the Broadcast Film Critics Association, five -- Javier Bardem's in The Sea Inside, Don Cheadle's in Hotel Rwanda, Johnny Depp's in Finding Neverland, Leonardo DiCaprio's in The Aviator and Jamie Foxx's in Ray -- are representations of actual lives, fretting and strutting their hour upon the stage. Only Paul Giamatti's wine-worshipping would-be author in Sideways was made up by a writer.
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 7:33 AM on Wednesday, December 15, 2004
The biggest squeaker in this morning's New York Film Critics Circle voting was over the Best Non-Fiction Film award going to Michael Moore's
Fahrenheit 9/11, according to the group's chairman Thelma Adams. "There has been a big pendulum swing against that movie," Adams confided late this morning. One of the concerns, said Adams, was "is it really a non-fiction film?"
F9/11's biggest competitor, was Jonathan Caouette's
Tarnation, while Kevin McDonald's
Touching the Void, she implied, was somewhere in the rear with the gear.
Sideways did as well as it did not only because "it's a great film all around," Adams said, but also...
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posted by Jeffrey Wells at 11:33 AM on Monday, December 13, 2004
Clint Eastwood has just been handed the New York Film Critics Circle's Best Director award for his work on Million Dollar Baby....terrific. There was obviously a bit of Sideways vs. Baby wrangling going on among the elite New York-area critics, with the Eastwood win smacking of some kind of spread-it-around compromise gesture. But good for Clint. Maybe between this and the Golden Globe nominations for Baby, he'll loosen up and start playing the awards-hustle game. "That's all it is," said Kris Kirstofferson's financial-shark character in Alan Pakula's Rollover, in the midst of slapping down some wimpy associate. "It's a damn game!"
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 10:52 AM on Monday, December 13, 2004
One of two Clint Eastwood scenarios (take your pick): (a) Clint won't "do" anything for
Milllion Dollar Baby...no q & a's at industry screenings, no honored-guest visits at film festivals, no sit-down slots on director's panels, or (b) he
will be doing things on occasion and just likes to play it loose, like a jazz musician. Eastwood's in-house Malpaso marketing guy Marco Barla has told one prestigious Los Angeles-area suitor that Eastwood is so adamant and dug-in about not doing publicity he isn't even asking Eastwood if he'll do this or that. (Barla isn't even picking up the phone about this issue, and...
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posted by Jeffrey Wells at 10:29 AM on Monday, December 13, 2004
Bulletin from a big-name regional critic: "I have been pestering the hell out of my [distant city]-based WB rep for a screening of Million Dollar Baby in [nearby city] before my Top Ten list is due, and have been told more or less that it likely won't happen. I was invited to see it later this week in [far-away city]: a five-hour roundtrip drive on a day when I've already got two screenings to attend here. Thanks much. Considering that his last was Mystic River, Clint Eastwood is getting fucked by his long-time studio on this one."
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 9:57 AM on Monday, December 13, 2004
And so the question, with four respected critic groups (from NYC, L.A., Boston and San Francisco) having given their Best Picture awards to Alexander Payne's excellent
Sideways: what happened to the supposed impact grenade of Clint Eastwood's
Million Dollar Baby? These critics groups are obviously exhibiting deep-rooted admiration for Payne's film, which I concur with, but Eastwood's boxing drama was supposed to be the big Last Minute Wow that was staggering critics of consequence...but this hasn't been evidenced so far by a Best Picture win. (Although Eastwood himself has won the NYFC's Best Director award, so that's something.) I guess this simply means...
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posted by Jeffrey Wells at 9:29 AM on Monday, December 13, 2004
Righteous vision sometimes pokes through:
Sideways has won the Best Picture award from the New York Film Critics Circle, which makes it...what?...four such honors over the last two days from critics orgs (L.A., New York, Boston, and San Francisco.)
Sideways sad-sack Paul Giamatti has won the New York Film Critics Circle award for Best Actor, and his costar Virginia Madsen has nabbed the NYFCC's Best Suporting Actress award, adding to the identical honor she was given last Saturday by the Los Angeles Film Critics Association.
Vera Drake's Imelda Staunton has been handed the NYFCC's Best Actress award following Saturday's LAFCA trophy for the...
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posted by Jeffrey Wells at 9:10 AM on Monday, December 13, 2004
This is just Monday-morning quarterbacking and by no means a critical issue, but Alexander Payne's
Sideways wasn't quite as favored to win the Best Picture award from the Los Angeles Film Critics Association last Saturday as much as Clint Eastwood's
Million Dollar Baby was, although the undeniably first-rate
Sideways took the prize in the end. Now there are hints that Warner Bros. publicity may not have pushed hard or early enough with
M$B screenings. Two critics who attended the LAFCA gathering on Saturday (at the home of
Variety and
Film Week critic Lael Lowenstein) say that LAFCA president Henry Sheehan announced just before...
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posted by Jeffrey Wells at 2:53 PM on Sunday, December 12, 2004
Hats in the air for
Sideways grabbing two Best Picture awards, from the L.A. Film Critics and New York Online Film Critics. And cheers to Thomas Haden Church, the film's amiable, clueless horndog, for scoring two Best Supporting Actor awards from the same groups. And a pat on the back for
Sideways director Alexander Payne also being toasted by LAFCA for his work, and to Payne and Jim Taylor for winning the Best Screenplay trophy, and Liam Neeson for winning LAFCA's Best Actor award for
Kinsey, and Imelda Staunton for winning...my God, I'm boring. Virginia Madsen won LAFCA's Best Actress award, and....I can't...
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posted by Jeffrey Wells at 11:01 PM on Saturday, December 11, 2004
Gold Derby.com's Tom O'Neill has written an
attack piece on the New York Film Critics Circle in the Arts and Leisure section of Sunday's (12.12)
New York Times. One of his big blasts is that the NYFCC "has fared terribly" when it comes to predicting Oscar's Best Picture, although they agreed with the Academy last year in giving their top trophy to
The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King. The NYFCC's last Oscar synch-up before that was giving their Best Picture award to
Schindler's List in '93, and two years before that to
The Silence of the Lambs....
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posted by Jeffrey Wells at 2:28 PM on Saturday, December 11, 2004
The scariest alien invasion movie of recent years, no question, was Shyamalan's
Signs, which was almost entirely about omens, shadows and bumps in the night. And here comes Steven Spielberg's
War of the Worlds (Paramount/DreamWorks, 6.29.05), his third movie about aliens visiting earth, and the first thing I get from the new
teaser is obviousness and deja vu. I'm speaking of those middle-American families standing in their nightgowns and bathrobes on a small-town neighborhood street at night, looking with concern at those flashing sky lights in the clouds on the far horizon. I thought right away of those flashing sky lights in...
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posted by Jeffrey Wells at 1:42 PM on Saturday, December 11, 2004
And yet (this is a surprise) I'm told that the middle-American milieu stuff in the
War of the Worlds teaser is essentially horseshit because they're not in the movie and don't really represent the film at all. As was reported in a recent
New York Times story about the
Worlds shoot in Bayonne, New Jersey, Spielberg has gone to great lengths to avoid suburban settings. Tom Cruise's character is a longshoreman, the movie takes place in rusted old working-class Newark neighborhoods, and, I'm told, out in the countryside. So
Worlds, it appears, couldn't be further from
Close Encounters. It's also weird that the...
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posted by Jeffrey Wells at 1:40 PM on Saturday, December 11, 2004
And by the way, the
Worlds marketing slogan is, "They're Already Here." As in hidden amongst us, preparing to strike, etc. Is anyone else hearing an echo? Just as the 1953 George Pal
War of the Worlds was, in the vein of
The Thing and other alien invasion movies of that period, a metaphor for a feared Communist takeover, the metaphor in Spielberg's film is...well, think about it. But it's not what you might think. If you read H.G. Wells' novel, which was an allegory about the demise of the British empire, it can be deduced that the Spielberg film isn't about fear...
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posted by Jeffrey Wells at 1:39 PM on Saturday, December 11, 2004
I've just seen for the very first time, via the new Universal Home Video DVD, Howard Hughes'
Hells Angels (1930). Despite some creaky elements here and there, it really isn't half bad. It has half-decent dialogue, characters you can grab hold of and relate to (or at least understand where they're coming from), a pair of aerial action sequences that kick serious ass, and a tough-hearted finale. The realism in the third-act dogfight sequence is inescapably thrilling and is obviously well-shot and well-cut, deploying a swarm of World War I biplanes. Hughes, the director and producer, took three years and spent close to...
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posted by Jeffrey Wells at 11:25 AM on Saturday, December 11, 2004
The first impact grenade has gone off in the vicinity of
Spanglish (Columbia, 12.17), and Tea Leoni's chalk-on-a-blackboard performance has taken the heaviest hit. "It's difficult to engage with a picture when a major character is so out of control emotionally as to require immediate institutionalization, even if no one in -- or behind -- the film seems to notice," declares
Variety critic Todd McCarthy. "So it is with Leoni's Deborah Clasky, a Bel-Air matron whose complete self-absorption has obliterated any personality and interests she once might have had. A clenched fist of knotted nerves tightened by constant workouts, Deborah can't relate to...
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posted by Jeffrey Wells at 8:08 AM on Saturday, December 11, 2004
Empty Jape
Ocean's Twelve (Warner Bros., playing everywhere) isn't quite abominable. You could be a hard-ass and call it that, but then you wouldn't be cool.
It's expensive and smart-assed and scenic as hell, and not in the least bit stupid. It's a very hip enterprise. There's just nothing there. Some goofy guy humor but no major laughs, no thrilling set pieces, no especially tasty performances, no suspense...just a bunch of kool kats (George Clooney, Brad Pitt, Matt Damon, et. al.) having a lot of fun shooting in Europe and getting paid a shitload.
Take our money this...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 11:09 AM on Friday, December 10, 2004
This hasn't gotten around all that much, but a well-placed source confides there was very little love earlier this year between Clint Eastwood and certain Warner Bros. production execs who had voiced almost no enthusiasm about making
Million Dollar Baby, on top of having pulled roughly the same crap when he tried to get them to support the making of
Mystic River two years ago. In both cases the WB production execs -- relative whippersnappers who don't get Eastwood because he's not much of a youth-market magnet -- "begrudgingly" okayed both films. The source says Eastwood "was so stung by the lack of...
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posted by Jeffrey Wells at 10:58 PM on Thursday, December 9, 2004
Nothing substantive can be gathered from a skillfully-cut teaser assembled from what will obviously be a sumptuous visual experience, but go to the
site for Terrence Malick's
The New World (New Line, late '05) and tell me it doesnÃt get your blood going. The dp is Emmanuel Lubezki (
Y Tu Mama Tambien,
Sleepy Hollow) and man oh man...
awesome. MalickÃs historical drama is another go at the age-old saga of Captain John Smith (Colin Farrell) and Pocahantas (Q'orianka Kilcher), set in olde Virginia. IÃll bet Farrell is comforted that the teaser has arrived right on the heels of the
Alexander shutdown. ThereÃs also...
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posted by Jeffrey Wells at 2:37 PM on Thursday, December 9, 2004
Speaking of Alexander, Oliver Stone will be talking this evening (Thursday, 11.9) with writer-director Rod Lurie on the stage of the Leo S. Bing theatre at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art at 7:30 pm.
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 2:33 PM on Thursday, December 9, 2004
Best prediction line so far about Saturday's L.A. Film Critics voting (which I'll be re-running in tomorrow's story about same): "Virginia Madsen would seem a Best Supporting Actress slam-dunk for Sideways, if only because every heterosexual male in the group would like to...well...give her an award."
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 2:09 PM on Thursday, December 9, 2004
I've been meaning to tap out something based on my recent Beverly Hills sit-down with
Fahrenheit 9/11 director Michael Moore, but I'll say this for now: In his meetings with local journos over the past couple of weeks, Moore
has been making a compelling argument.
Fahrenheit is alive and well in the Best Picture competish despite John Kerry's loss because "it's the emotion, stupid." Moore didn't use these words (he's graciously soft-peddled and aw-shucksy in private conversation), but he's right -- his film made people a lot of people tear up (it got to me this way when I saw it at Cannes),...
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posted by Jeffrey Wells at 1:07 PM on Thursday, December 9, 2004
Most of you have probably clicked on this by now, but Milk and Cookies has a silent clip of that deleted
sex scene from Matt and Trey's
Team America: World Police. You know, the one the MPAA ratings board kept sending back for more cuts. Whatever...
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 7:34 PM on Wednesday, December 8, 2004
Game Over
The '04 Oscar Best Picture race is all over but the shouting and the ad buys. Clint Eastwood's
Million Dollar Baby (Warner Bros., 12.15) is it, and that's that.
I'm saying this with a twinge of regret since it affects the chances of my personal Best Picture favorite, Alexander Payne's Sideways. I wish it were otherwise.
The only thing that can stop Million Dollar Baby at this stage is some kind of backlash about the elements that don't quite work -- the retarded kid in the gym, the roteness of Hilary Swank's first-round knockouts, etc. But I...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 3:38 PM on Wednesday, December 8, 2004
Another words-in-passing quote, this one from
Meet the Fockers costar Dustin Hoffman in the current issue of
Time: "
Meet the Parents was a really good comedy," he begins. "It had layers, and it hit some interesting notes. But with this thing, I don't ever recall being in a movie that seemed to get this kind of steam going before it opened. I mean, it's just a nice movie. Why do people seem so interested?" Choke,
cough, uhhh....excuse me, but did Hoffman just call
Meet the Fockers a "thing"? Upon hearing this, Hoffman's costar Robert de Niro gives off, according to
Time, a "low...
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posted by Jeffrey Wells at 3:07 PM on Tuesday, December 7, 2004
Who could have predicted that a respected consummate chronicler of the difficult lives of extremely bright, neurotic-eccentric but always charming and/or impassioned people of a sensitive liberal bent...who would have guessed that a director-writer known for his open-to-delicate-feelings, Blue State, westside-of-Los-Angeles attitudes in his films....who could have foreseen that this famously whiskered director would deliver a comedy-drama that quite clearly frowns upon and in fact, through the eyes of the film's lead character, strongly condemns the probably-too-affluent, neurotically distracted personalities who comprise a westside family in present-day Los Angeles? For years to come Red-State politicans will point to this movie and say, "
This...
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posted by Jeffrey Wells at 2:24 PM on Tuesday, December 7, 2004
So Jude Law is being sent back to the minors (and parts like that weirdo photographer assassin in
Road to Perdition) because he was in six movies this year and none of them stuck to the wall, and his his biggest and broadest movie-star performance (in
Alfie) wasn't a hot-enough ticket? Okay, maybe Law
should be a character actor, but no sooner do people find the spotlight, it seems, than the fast-action, short-attention-spanners give them the hook. It's a cold and randomly cruel world out there. As
Newsweek's Jeff Giles recently said, we have reached a critical stage in the
Us Magazine poisoning...
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posted by Jeffrey Wells at 2:06 PM on Tuesday, December 7, 2004
The Phantom of the Opera is bleeding, staggering, crashing into walls....day after day people tell me "no, forget it, not this one." A death of a thousand cuts.
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 9:37 AM on Tuesday, December 7, 2004
Here it is, and this is the truth:
Sideways is still the best film of the year, but time and again in conversations I'm picking up respect (even grudging respect at times) for Alexander Payne's masterful, emotionally rounded adult comedy-drama more than whole-hearted affection or awe. The winner in this regard is Clint Eastwood's
Million Dollar Baby, which, as far as I can tell, is far and away the leading contender for the Best Picture Oscar. The third extreme likelihood, I keep hearing, is Taylor Hackford's
Ray -- a decently-assembled biopic that no one dislikes (or is attacking). But Eastwood's entry is unquestionably...
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posted by Jeffrey Wells at 8:52 AM on Tuesday, December 7, 2004
With the at-long-last screenings this week of James L. Brooks'
Spanglish, all the presumed Oscar-level stuff has now been seen and everyone is starting to shift into kick-back mode with the remaining December releases, two of which -- Uni's
Meet the Fockers and Fox's
Flight of the Phoenix -- don't seem to be the sort of thing that will weigh heavily upon anyone's soul. No offense to the intrepid Scott Rudin, but I'd prefer to overlook Par's
Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events for the time being. I have a certain aversion to Jim-Carrey-in-elaborate-makeup films. Actually, I have a slight aversion to...
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posted by Jeffrey Wells at 8:31 AM on Tuesday, December 7, 2004
How can one not be moved by the intimations of loyalty and compassion being shown on behalf of Martin Scorsese and his latest film,
The Aviator, by admiring smart- guy critics like Emanuel Levy and
Variety's Todd McCarthy, among others? But even in the expressions of respect and enthusiasm for a great director, limits should be observed. Levy cannot proclaim on the front page of Movie City News that this biopic about the young to middle-aged Howard Hughes is "extremely entertaining" and not expect others (me, for instance) to slap their heads in disbelief. Offer, if you must, the flimsy argument that
The...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 7:05 AM on Tuesday, December 7, 2004
Newsweek critic David Ansen says there's "fun to be had" in Ocean's Twelve (Warner Bros., 12.10), but otherwise....aah, why paraphrase? "There's so much going on in Steven Soderbergh's sequel -- George Nolfi's screenplay seems like three slightly different movies competing for dominance -- that everyone gets short shrift," Ansen writes. "Ocean's Twelve is busier, messier and thinner than its predecessor, and while it looks like the cast is having a blast and a half, the studied hipness can get so pleased with itself it borders on the smug." Borders?
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 10:34 AM on Monday, December 6, 2004
I said two or three weeks ago that
The Phantom of the Opera is not hateful
and is sufficiently emotionally grandiose that it may well end up with a Best Picture nomination....who knows? Not my cup of tea but it meets a certain middle-class criteria, etc. Well, since then the
Phantom haters have been gaining ground and now I'm hearing all around that it's not good enough, it's not
Chicago, Joel Schmuacher is not Baz Luhrman, and so on. All right, maybe so. On the other side of the ledger are all those Average Joe types who've been delighted and turned on by...
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posted by Jeffrey Wells at 10:11 AM on Monday, December 6, 2004
Underground Man
Remember when the prospect of a new, soon-to-open Steven Soderbergh film would bump up your pulse rate a bit?
It came out of that electric surge he had between '98 and '00, that dam burst of creative energy manifested in Out of Sight, The Limey, Erin Brockovich and Traffic. The 38 year-old Soderbergh won a Best Director Oscar for Traffic in March '01, and I remember watching from some crowded Oscar party and loudly whoo-whooing when this happened. Great achievement, glorious night.
It was precisely four years ago when I first saw the superb Traffic, and...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 1:23 PM on Friday, December 3, 2004
Brad Pitt talking about Ocean's 12 costar Catherine Zeta Jones: "I think the biggest joke was on Catherine because she actually thought we were making a movie. Being the new kid, nobody told her because she was up running lines and breaking down her character." As always, it's the the words in passing -- the Latin term is obiter dicta -- that give the game away. Pitt's remark seems to confirm what I've been hearing, which is that Ocean's 12 is a jokey romp piece and will probably prove to be something of a fast burn, playdate-wise.
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 11:43 AM on Thursday, December 2, 2004
The limited opening of Clint Eastwood's Million Dollar Baby will happen two days earlier -- on Wednesday, 12.15. That means Warner Bros. feels very confident about the response. They should be.
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 11:14 AM on Thursday, December 2, 2004
"Fascinating, full-throttle DiCaprio performance, although he really isn't right for the role...not really. Otherwise, it's an OCD fest that drags in the middle, is way too long, feels curiously over-cut and over-accelerated in the beginning, and, some brilliant sequences aside (like the plane crash in Beverly Hills), is, for me, a major wipe-out. A good half of it is schizy wackjob OCD stuff...OCD, OCD, itching, twitching...twelve peas on the plate, bloodshot eyes, compulsive hand-washing, the horrors of dirt and lint, urine-filled milk bottles. Howard Hughes had to be a more intriguing guy than this. Cate Blanchett is a lot of fun as Kate...
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posted by Jeffrey Wells at 10:53 AM on Thursday, December 2, 2004
The Goonies
It's time once again to respond to the salutations of those New York secular know-nothings, the National Board of Review...even though they make calls every so often that I agree with. Like this morning's decision to give their Best Director award to
Collateral's Michael Mann...yes!
The NBR announced their 2004 movie awards around 11 am this morning (12.1), and will hand them out at their usual Tavern on the Green ceremony on 1.11.05.
I think giving the Best Picture prize to Finding Neverland is from the Planet Neptune. Marc Forster's moderately-appealing period drama has a sweetly touching...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 7:40 PM on Wednesday, December 1, 2004
