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)
Ask anyone -- the Sundance Film Festival award that really counts is the Audience Award, and yesterday's (Saturday, 1.29) winner of that honor was Craig Brewer's Hustle & Flow....right on. Another thing you can usually depend upon is that the Sundance jurors will give their dramatic competition Grand Jury prize to a film that a lot of people didn't get or flat-out didn't like. This was clearly the case when they give their big trophy to Ira Sachs' Forty Shades of Blue, a romantic triangle drama set in Memphis. At least four times during the festival I was told in no uncertain terms...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 9:59 AM on Sunday, January 30, 2005
A few days ago Oscar handicapper Pete Hammond said in this column that if Martin Scorsese doesn't win the Director's Guild of America "outstanding directorial achievement" award for his direction of The Aviator, "all bets are off." What he meant was, Scorsese's chances of winning the Best Director Oscar will be strongly diminished. So I guess it's fair to say that all bets are indeed off since Clint Eastwood has won this award for his direction of Million Dollar Baby. Congrats, also, to Byambasuren Davaa and Luigi Falorni for nabbing the DGA's best Documentary award for The Story of the Weeping Camel.
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 8:06 AM on Sunday, January 30, 2005
Okay, so maybe a lead story about the intoxicating elements within a certain woman's personality isn't exactly a page-one topic, but I'm covering the Santa Barbara Film Festival this weekend and for what it's worth and what-the-hell, here is Saturday's earthshaker:
Oscar screenwriting nominee Julie Delpy (for her Before Sunset collaboration with Richard Linklater and Ethan Hawke) totally killed at Saturday's screenwriter's panel at the Lobero Theatre.
Actress-screenwriter Julie Delpy during Saturday afternoon's panel discussion, "It Starts With the Script," at the Santa Barbara Film Festival.
Between phone-installation delays, not enough sleep, column-posting problems, visits to medical clincs, computer spyware issues, too much stress and spending a small fortune on taxi fares, all I want is to get the hell out of here. I've seen some interesting, at times very affecting films in Park City, and yes, I will try and tap out some thoughts and impressions about some of these tomorrow morning (particularly of The Chumscrubber, which I'm seeing tonight) but after six days of this 6:30 am to 1:30 am routine your seams start to tear.
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 5:44 PM on Tuesday, January 25, 2005
Isn't it ironic that Paul Giamatti is standing side-by-side with fellow Oscar nominees Leonardo DiCaprio, Kate Winslet, Jamie Foxx, et. al., on the cover of the current Newsweek ("Oscar Confidential") and his Oscar nominee status, as of this morning, is no more? It's the Eisenhower-era members of the Academy who voted against him, I suspect....or rather against Miles, his Sideways character. Giamatti's deeply touching, occasionally side-splitting performance was one of '04's finest, but Academy blue-hairs had no tolerance for Miles' morose, schlubby, wine-swigging behavior. The death blow, I'm guessing, was over Miles having stolen money from his mother's bedroom dresser.
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 5:23 PM on Tuesday, January 25, 2005
And so begins my eighth and final day in Park City, Utah, and I can't think of a common thread or theme that fits the experience. The days have burned through like a lit dynamite fuse in a Sam Peckinpah film, only there hasn't been any kind of explosive finish and I don't expect there to be. I'm just looking for a clean exit.
All I want to do today is see two or three more films (Hustle & Flow again, just for fun...and then Heights, This Revolution or Ellie Parker), tap out some final thoughts on Thursday morning, and fly...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 3:55 PM on Tuesday, January 25, 2005
I haven't got time to think things through or make what I'm tapping out here sound as good as it ought to, and it pains me to just put stuff up without refinements, but...
The most satisfying Sundance films I've seen over the last four days, in this order, are: Craig Brewer's Hustle & Flow, Greg Mclean's Wolf Creek (which I wrote about last Friday), and Craig Lucas' The Dying Gaul (angrier and more bitter than it needs to be, but is nonetheless a fully felt, precisely crafted piece about denial and betrayal, a superb psychological suspense drama and a nicely...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 11:08 AM on Monday, January 24, 2005
I'll be banging out a Monday column, of course, but why not run some photos I took on Friday and Saturday right now (i.e., Sunday afternoon)?
Sunday's big festival news is the enormous response to Craig Brewer's astounding and immensely satisfying Hustle & Flow after an 8:30 pm screening Saturday night at the Park City Racquet Club, along with this morning's announcement that the film has been acquired for $9 million by MTV/Paramount.
Part of the Hustle & Flow posse after Saturday night's screening at the Park City Racquet Club: (l. to r.) Terrence Howard, producer...
Craig Brewer's Hustle & Flow, so far the one absolute knockout of the '05 Sundance Film Festival, was acquired for theatrical distribution Saturday night by MTV/Paramount for $9 million. The total fee is actually $16 million for a 3-picture deal that will cover two other films to be produced and directed by Flow producer John Singleton for $3.5 million each. Paramount publicist Nancy Kirkpatrick called to say that Paramount's newly-installed chief Brad Grey, marketing head Rob Friedman and production president Donald De Line saw it in Los Angeles on Saturday night while Viacom co-president and COO Tom Freston was catching it at the...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 11:24 AM on Sunday, January 23, 2005
I talked to a critic last night (i.e., Saturday) who acknowledged that Craig Brewer's Hustle & Flow is obviously well-liked by the Sundance audience so far and is "the first movie to break through" so far. However, an opinion was also confided that it's basically "bullshit" and "straight out of 1930s Warner Bros. formula." I'm sorry but this critic (a very smart fellow) has never been more wrong. I know what it feels like when a Sundance movie has gone through the roof. Okay...mountain-air syndrome, right? But I know when a movie is working on all six cylinders (notice I didn't say eight...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 11:08 AM on Sunday, January 23, 2005
"I've seen 10 Sundance films in the last two days," an exhibitor friend confides, "and the the highlight so far, unquetionably, has been Steve Buscemi's Lonesome Jim, which is one of the most beautiful odes to a pathetic human life ever put to screen. It's a breakthrough vehicle for star Casey Affleck. "The only thing the film has against it is a horribly cheap look as a result of being shot on shit-level video. It might have been the projection at the press screening but given that most things in there have been projected digitally, I somehow doubt it. Try and check it...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 2:43 PM on Friday, January 21, 2005
I'm going to try and tap out WIRED stuff as much as I can between screenings. Whatever's happened, whatever shaking...and let me just say, sitting here in the Intel room at the Yarrow, that there's nothing quite so awful to listen to as the sound of forced gaiety. It sounds anxious, desperate-to-please, and bordering on panic.
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 2:40 PM on Friday, January 21, 2005
I'm still at the Intel room at the Yarrow, and an hour ago I was shut out of seeing Warner Indepdedent's The Jacket, which started at 2:30 pm. It's some kind of Gulf War-driven time-travel nightmare psychodrama, and the advance talk has been pretty good. I guess you have to arrive at Yarrow press screenings a good 20 to 30 minutes before or forget it. It costars Adrien Brody, Kiera Knightley, Daniel Craig, Kris Kristofferson and Kelly Lynch. My next film (hopefully) is David LaChappelle's Rize, but it's screening at the dreaded Library, and that's always a hassle.
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 2:22 PM on Friday, January 21, 2005
I started to fall ill Wednesday evening -- coughing, congestion -- and I felt sicker all day Thursday. I did a lot of sleeping, drank a lot of water. And on top of this, I discovered Wednesday night that the phone in the condo I'm staying in has been shut off, so there's been no internet (and the phone won't be turned back on until Friday morning...great).
But at least I managed to drop by the Sundance Film Festival headquarters Thursday morning to pick up my press pass, along with three 'loaner' tapes of Sundance flicks. I went back...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 1:22 PM on Friday, January 21, 2005
I came to chortle at Inside Deep Throat and, to be honest, maybe feel a tiny bit excited by it...but I came away feeling leveled-out, sobered-up, un-randy.
Sobered up doesn't mean bummed, which is how I pretty much felt after seeing Deep Throat itself. It was such a shitty movie...so cheesy, stupid, clueless. But it made raunch seem hip for that five- or ten-minute period in `72 or '73 with the New York Times-propagated concept of "porno chic."
Okay, there was something cool and, of course, basically harmless about middle-class couples, single women and other...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 2:36 PM on Wednesday, January 19, 2005
A 1.19.05 item in the New York Post's "Page Six" column read, "Don't assume that Golden Globes winners will walk off with Oscars next month. The idea that the Globes are still "a major influencer of the Oscar nominations or final outcome is an embarrassment," declares movie writer David Poland, "much the same as so many Americans believing that Saddam Hussein was directly responsible for 9/11." Hollywood columnist Jeffrey Wells agrees, noting that the Globes, which are given out by the laughably dilettantish Hollywood Foreign Press Association, "really don't count anymore. They're a distraction at best, and are at the beginning of a...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 9:41 AM on Monday, January 17, 2005
I'll have more to say about the Golden Globe awards on Wednesday, but aside from the surprise of Leonardo DiCaprio winning the Best Actor trophy (a fiercely committed actor who, as Howard Hughes, goes for broke, but still looks like a kid playing dress-up) and The Aviator itself winning for Best Drama, which frankly surprised me, the underlying feeling is that the Golden Globes really don't count any more...not really. They're a distraction at best, and are at the beginning of a stage in their evolution in which they're going to be seen as a bigger and broader object of mockery as the...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 9:21 AM on Monday, January 17, 2005
There's a clip in the trailer for Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbatos' Inside Deep ThroatInside Deep Throat (Universal, 2.11) quoting a guy involved with the distribution of this infamous 1972 porn film saying, "We have so much cash, we don't even count it -- we weigh it!" This alone supports my long-held suspicion that this will be one very cool documentary...fascinating, hilarious, whatever.
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 3:20 PM on Saturday, January 15, 2005
With Miramax's Bob and Harvey Weinstein only two or three weeks away from signing final divorce papers with Disney, there's a rumble (about two or three weeks old, apparently) about Mouse execs offering Warner Independent Pictures chief Mark Gill the job of running Miramax after the brothers depart. It's a flakey rumor, apparently...but not entirely flakey, as as the Miramax gig (presuming Gill has even discussed it) might carry a certain allure, given WIP's so-far mixed track record. As he was just starting the WIP gig in August '03, Gill told the Hollywood Reporter's Stephen Galloway, "The biggest pitfall is if you choose...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 1:50 PM on Saturday, January 15, 2005
To the list of presumed front-runners for the Best Foreign Film Oscar(Cronicas, Downfall, Les Choristes, The Sea Inside, House of Flying Daggers), I'm told I should add Darrell Roodt's Yesterday, a South African drama about a struggling AIDS-afflicted couple with a young daughter. ("Yesterday" is the name of the mother character, played by Leleti Khumalo.) I missed seeing it on Friday night (1.14) because the screening coincided with my son's flight to Boston from Long Beach Airport. HBO had something to do with making (or financing) it, although they aren't mentioned on the IMDB, but I'm told the film may open theatrically in...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 1:27 PM on Saturday, January 15, 2005
There's this extremely weird, slightly satiric, observational fly-on-the-wall piece by Christian Moerk in Sunday's New York Times about the first meeting between Paramount Pictures' recently hired film division chairman and chief executive Brad Grey and the studio's "entire senior-executive phalanx" in an executive boardroom last January 6th. There's no angle or point to it -- it's not some thoughtfully considered New Yorker or New York Observer-type thing. It just says to the reader, "Our guy was told about this big meeting, and here are the details he was given...ten days after the fact." The three funniest bits are (a) Moerk's...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 11:46 AM on Saturday, January 15, 2005
Those heading to the Sundance Film Festival next week will be messing up hugely if they don't catch Cronicas, a creepy investigation piece and a penetrating morality tale about a tabloid TV news team on the trail of a serial child killer.
It's the first serious high-performance film I've seen this year, and if there's any justice in the world it'll be among the five Best Foreign Film Oscar nominees that are being announced on 1.25, along with Downfall, Les Choristes, The Sea Inside and House of Flying Daggers.
Go-getter tabloid-show reporter John Leguizamo (r.) during...
You can toss out the concept of Richard Kelly's Southland Tales, which has been described in some circles as a genre hybrid of comedy/musical/thriller/science-fiction or, in somewhat plainer terms, as a big social-political satire....you can forget any ideas of it coming out in '05, despite my having listed Tales in Wednesday's column as a hot-ticket due sometime later this year. Too bad, but there's no way it'll be out before '06. But if you want a little taste now (and I highly recommend this), click here .
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 10:06 PM on Thursday, January 13, 2005
Two more connections between those sound-alike Sundance movies, Thumbsucker and The Chumscrubber. One, they were both produced by Bob Yari, a former real-estate guy who now heads a company called the Yari Film Group. And two, they both costar 19 year-old Lou Pucci. Thumbsucker, which costars Tilda Swinton and Keanu Reeves, was shot almost a year before Chumscrubber, which stars Jamie Bell, Camilla Belle (also the costar of The Ballad of Jack and Rose), Ralph Fiennes, Rory Culkin, and Glenn Close. There's also a Park City at Midnight film called Ass-Muncher....kidding!
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 4:38 PM on Thursday, January 13, 2005
Liam Neeson as Abraham Lincoln? Perfect...not just because of the facial and body-type similarities, but also a look of kindliness in Neeson's eyes that I've noticed in those two or three Matthew Brady portraits of Lincoln. Variety is reporting that Steven Spielberg has begun talks with Neeson to play Lincoln in a film based on Doris Kearns Goodwin's "The Uniter: The Genius of Abraham Lincoln," which will be published next fall. The plan is for the biopic to start production in January '06.
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 11:17 AM on Wednesday, January 12, 2005
It would be highly unlikely, not to mention beside the point, if Kearns or Spielberg were to touch upon the recently-raised issue of the younger Abe Lincoln's alleged bisexuality, as explored by C. A. Tripp's controversial book, "The Intimate World of Abraham Lincoln." The focus of the Spielberg film, after all, will be the middle-aged Lincoln's grappling with the Civil War. In any event, Lincoln biographer and respected historian Gore Vidal discusses Tripp's work and the evidence about Lincoln's friendships with Joshua Speed, A.Y. Ellis and fellow lawyer Henry Whitney in a current posting on Vanity Fair's website.
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 11:02 AM on Wednesday, January 12, 2005
And speaking of Neeson, it seems slightly odd to see him happily grinning alongside his Phantom Menace costars on the cover of the current Vanity Fair, considering the stories that went around in '99 that the one-two punch of acting in front of green-screen digital backgrounds in that George Lucas film plus the same experience on Jan de Bont's The Haunting led Neeson to briefly consider quitting acting...or so it was reported at the time.
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 10:47 AM on Wednesday, January 12, 2005
After directing films for no other studio but Warner Bros. for 28 years straight (i.e., except for Columbia's Absolute Power), Clint Eastwood will briefly jump ship when he makes his next movie -- a time-shifting father-son World War II flick called Flags of Our Fathers -- for DreamWorks this summer.
The film will be based on James Bradley and Ron Powers' book of the same name, which was published in 2000. It recounts the sometimes tragic tales of the six Marines who raised the American flag on Mount Suribachi (*) on February 23, 1945, during the American forces' battle for Iwo...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 9:31 AM on Wednesday, January 12, 2005
With the Golden Globes happening this Sunday (1.16), an oddsmaker for Tom O'Neill's GoldDerby.com named David Scott is asserting that Martin Scorsese's The Aviator is a 6-to-5 favorite to win the Best Drama trophy. This implies, of course, that the Howard Hughes biopic is also slightly more favored to take the Best Picture Oscar than other contenders. I have two words for the east-coast contingent that seriously believes in the Marty/Aviator mythology -- Miramax kool-aid. (Is that three words?) Truly, the delusion behind this prediction reminds me of Jonestown. Now, it may be that Scorsese will take the Best Director prize this Sunday...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 7:34 AM on Wednesday, January 12, 2005
Got another gig for a clever trust-fund journalist looking to build a rep. I need a 20-something man/woman to author a Hollywood Elsewhere column that almost totally rips off Defamer...same attitude, style, tone, brevity...only a bit different. And I need someone to run it -- write it, grab and crop photos, do headlines, publish it from their home/office, etc. I have no shame about ripping off other sites and columns, as long as you don't totally copy them. Get in touch and we'll talk.
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 4:06 PM on Tuesday, January 11, 2005
As expected, it's happened -- Michael Moore's Fahrenhit 9/11 has won the '05 People's Choice Award for favorite movie of the year. "We live in a great country and we all love our country very much and I am so amazed that you did this...the people of America...that you voted for this film," Moore said at the podium, not letting on that he'd been tipped a couple of days ago, probably because it's a fairly common practice. Moore dedicated the award to the U.S troops fighting in Iraq, and said, "I'm honored and gratified." Will this up the odds of F 9/11 getting...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 8:50 PM on Sunday, January 9, 2005
A flattering quote from Slate critic David Edelstein on behalf of Universal's more-or-less dreadful White Noise ran in a full-page ad in last Friday's Los Angeles Times. It says, "I screamed louder than I've ever screamed before"...which seems odd. Knowing the film's "scary" moments to be on the cheap and hackneyed side, and knowing Edelstein to be fairly sharp and all, it seemed bizarre that he would have said this...unless, of course, he was being insincere. Then I found the original quote and discovered Edelstein more or less meant it. He called White Noise "an otherwise lousy horror movie," and besides the screaming...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 2:35 PM on Sunday, January 9, 2005
Much of Southern California has been taking a shower for the last several days, and it won't be toweling off until at least Tuesday or thereabouts. What this is is a kind of metaphorical cleansing, or perhaps even a metaphysical comment of some kind. It is, to me, almost the same thing as the raining frogs in Paul Thomas Anderson's Magnolia. L.A. will be, for a few days at least, a slightly less soiled and shallow place because of the rain. Tens of thousands are experiencing similar epiphanies and reviewing their lives as they stare out the window and lie in their beds...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 7:41 AM on Sunday, January 9, 2005
The story wasn't about Paul Newman's being unhurt after the engine of his race car caught fire during a test run at Daytona on Saturday,1.8 -- the story is that a 79 year-old guy is driving race cars. I know people who are 39 or 29, even, who would choke at the thought of testing or pushing themselves, and will never know what it is to step outside their comfort zone and put it on the line. Winston Churchill once said of his experience in the Boer War that "there is nothing so exhilarating as to be shot at without...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 7:19 AM on Sunday, January 9, 2005
I'm shocked, shocked to read that Michael Moore has allegedly been tipped off in advance that Fahrenheit 9/11 has been named the People's Choice Favorite Film of 2004, according to Gold Derby.com's Tom O'Neill. Big deal -- it's not like it's the Oscars or anything. O'Neill admitted in an e-mail announcing his exclusive about Moore's early information that "even though People's Choice Award winners usually pretend to be surprised when their names are announced as champs, the fact that CBS really tips them off early has always been a poorly kept secret in the media world and, strangely, has never become controversial." So...?
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 10:31 PM on Friday, January 7, 2005
I guess ’05 isn’t going to be such a bad year after all.
I asked readers to suggest upcoming film titles to complement Wednesday’s piece about the year’s most promising features (“Whole ’05 Enchiladaâ€), and I was reminded of a few good ones. The overall list of probable good’s to very good’s is now up to 23, and the list of maybe’s and wait-and-see’s is up to 10, for a grand total of 33.
I’ve broken the whole list down into three seasonal sections in an article that follows this one.
For what it's worth, this column humbly salutes War of the Worlds director Steven Spielberg for donating $1.5 million to the post-tsunami humanitarian effort, and Sandra Bullock for putting $1 million into the same bucket. Spielberg announced it because he'd like other moneybags to follow suit.
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 1:34 PM on Thursday, January 6, 2005
Has everyone heard? After two and a half decades of being a Grand Technological Poobah whose interest in ars gratia artis was totally nil, George Lucas now wants to be Gregg Araki. In the new Hollywood-Oscar issue of Vanity Fair, next to a big photo of the Star Wars cast members, Lucas is quoted as saying that the finishing of Star Wars, Episode III: Revenge of the Sith marks the end of an era in his career, and that he now plans to stop making overtly commercial films, which has been his basic program since the mid '70s. Lucas tells the magazine, "I'm...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 10:41 AM on Thursday, January 6, 2005
Honestly? Right now? The '05 films I'm seriously excited about number exactly 22. And that's pushing it. Make it 17 picks and 5 toothpicks. And I didn't just toss this list off out of boredom. I thought hard about my quirks and prejudices and sorted 'em all out.
There are at least five or six winners I'm overlooking or haven't even heard of yet. That always happens. They'll surface soon enough. In alphabetical order...
Steven Zallian's All The King's Men (Columbia, no release date but probably fall/holiday) Following in the trail of Robert Rossen's 1949 original,...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 3:12 PM on Wednesday, January 5, 2005
Jeff Leeds' weekend box-office story in today's (1.3) New York Times quotes Box Office Mojo's Brandon Gray saying something rather odd. The crop of Oscar-buzz films "is somewhat anemic this season, and that's something the Academy needs to be aware of," Gray says, referring to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, whose membership votes on the Oscars. He adds, "If they nominate only pictures that people are not going to see, they can expect lower ratings" for the 2.27 Oscar broadcast. Hear that, fellas? If the film or filmmaker you admire the most hasn't delivered (or isn't on the way to...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 8:36 PM on Monday, January 3, 2005
Two similar-sounding, three-syllable, young-guy-with-a-problem movies are playing at Sundance '05 -- The Chumscrubber and Thumbsucker. And are both about suburban ennui and that line of country. Not to sound harsh or dismissive, but I really don't want to see a movie about a guy who sucks his thumb. Arie Posin's Chumscrubber, a Premiere selection about, yes, despair and alienation in an idyllic California 'burb (is there any other kind?), costars Jamie Bell, Ralph Fiennes, Carrie-Ann Moss, Glenn Close, Allison Janey. Mike Mills' Thumbsucker, playing in the Dramatic Competition section, is a portrait of addiction but is presumably about something else besides. (Please.) It...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 8:58 AM on Monday, January 3, 2005
Snipers are taking shots at Million Dollar Baby (and not just the Paulettes), and now New York Times critic A.O. Scott has given voice to the one I've been hearing for weeks about critics liking Sideways because they relate to Paul Giamatti's Myles character -- they look like him, think like him, he's a critic type, etc. And because he winds up with a hot soulful lady (Virginia Madsen) who gets what he's about. Well, yeah...partly...nice fantasy. But if a movie has three good scenes that touch bottom, it's a movie that stands up on its own despite what admiring critics say. And...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 8:03 PM on Sunday, January 2, 2005
In a TV clip, Don Cheadle said about the real-life story behind Hotel Rwanda: "It's Africa's holocaust, and it's still happening, and people...don't know about it." Cheadle paused between saying the words "people" and "don't," and I'm sure he briefly considered saying "don't want to know about it"...until thinking better of it.
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 7:13 PM on Sunday, January 2, 2005
Brad Grey, the big-wheel talent manager, is "expected to be named head of Paramount Pictures as early as this week," according to a Sunday story by L.A. Times reporters Claudia Eller and Sallie Hofmeister. The move "is likely to bring sweeping changes for the storied and recently troubled studio." Sources said Grey was in the final stages of negotiations with Paramount parent Viacom Inc. to succeed studio chief Sherry Lansing, who announced two months ago that she would retire after 12 years on the job. Grey, the story noted, "has a relatively poor box-office track record, having produced such flops as City by...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 1:53 PM on Sunday, January 2, 2005
A filmmaker friend sat down with Harvey Weinstein in London a few days ago and says he's lost 35 or 40 pounds, and that the apparent inspiration is that he's got a new British actress girlfriend and "he's in love." I wrote a London columnist friend and asked about this....nothing back yet. Poly Giannabi, a London reader, says she "saw Harvey Weinstein on British TV, at the British premiere of The Aviator. It's true about the weight loss...he's down at least 30-40 pounds. I almost didn't recognize him."
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 1:48 PM on Sunday, January 2, 2005
Got a hot Sundance '05 pic. Actually, just a flick I'm hearing may be one of the hotties...for GenXers with a desperate need to feel superficially hip, at least. It's John Asher and Jenny McCarthy's Dirty Love, a "Park City at Midnight" selection about a Hollywood girl named Rebecca (McCarthy)going through betrayal, homelessness and hard times. The program calls it "a laugh-out-loud, hilarious manifestation" of Asher and McCarthy's "warped minds," with "unforgettable and outrageous hijinks."
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 1:34 PM on Sunday, January 2, 2005
