Reporters I've spoken to are saying the Miramax farewell-to-the-past, hello-to-the- future party last Saturday at the Pacific Design Center was some kind of downbeat, desultory affair. It was fine -- a spirited, informal, family-type thing. A spunky, slimmed-down Harvey Weinstein said the new company that he and his brother Bob will be launching sometime next fall (after the Disney contract comes to a close in September) will "kick up a lot of dust." Looking forward....
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 2:23 PM on Monday, February 28, 2005
Sorry, Bud
You never cared about this stuff, and you
really couldn't care less from wherever you might be now, but I'm profoundly pissed about the Oscar producers not giving you a special tribute reel of your own last night. Pissed and ashamed and a little bit disgusted.
...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 5:10 PM on Friday, February 25, 2005
As Slate critic David Edelstein claims to have written in his hard-hitting book, When Awards Lie, "Oscars are not about merit blah blah but how the Hollywood establishment blah blah politics blah blah middlebrow blah guilty liberal blah old blah blah Valenti blah no Citizen Kane blah blah no Hitchcock blah blah Gladiator..." Couldn't have said it better myself.
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 7:07 AM on Friday, February 25, 2005
Hooray for Palm Pictures for having convinced the MPAA's ratings appeals board to roll back on that R rating they gave Gunner Palace a few weeks ago, and give it a PG-13 instead. The R rating was all over language. The doc, produced and directed by Michael Tucker and Petra Epperlein, is about grunts doing the day-to-day in Iraq. The title refers to a bombed-out pleasure palace once owned by Saddam Hussein's son Uday, but occupied by the "gunners" after the U.S. occupation.
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 7:04 PM on Thursday, February 24, 2005
Different Game
Ben Affleck's career may be on the ropes, but at least he seems to get that...and is doing something about it. Like being adaptable enough to take only $500,000 upfront for playing George Reeves, the amiable TV actor who shot himself over career problems in 1959, in Focus Features'
Truth, Justice and the American Way.
This may sound like a bit of a comedown for a guy who used to pocket $12 million or so per film, and who earned a lot more, reportedly, from a back-end revenue deal his agent cut over Pearl Harbor...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 3:09 PM on Wednesday, February 23, 2005
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 7:18 AM on Monday, February 21, 2005
Hollywood Reporter columnist Anne Thompson, writing under her old L.A. Weekly moniker of "Risky Business," says that Vanity Fair cover girl Cate Blanchett "certainly...has an edge in the supporting actress category and should grab The Aviator's one acting Oscar for her brilliant impersonation of Katharine Hepburn." Whoa, whoa...hold up. Blanchett will win the Oscar because she does a good impersonation? Virginia Madsen's straight-from-the-heart, soul-stirring performance in Sideways is going to lose out to Blanchett's fluttery little Hepburn laugh ("Haaah...hahahaha!") that everybody remembers from Bringing Up Baby and The Philadelphia Story?
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 6:35 PM on Friday, February 18, 2005
We'll Call You
A couple of months ago I wrote a
tough piece about my disappointment with Steven Soderbergh's output over the last three or four years, and then Soderbergh let me have it at a Sundance party a few weeks later and I heard what he was saying (or feeling), so here's something olive-branchy:
Unscripted, a half-hour HBO series that Soderbergh and his Section Eight partner George Clooney have exec produced (with Clooney directing now and then), is the best original thing I've seen on the tube in a long, long time.
...
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posted by Jeffrey Wells at 3:55 PM on Friday, February 18, 2005
It's hard to tell if Gold Derby.com's Tom O'Neill caved on his support of Martin Scorsese's
The Aviator two weeks ago or just a day or two ago, but in any case he's finally folded his tent and admitted that Clint Eastwood's
Million Dollar Baby is the more likely Best Picture Oscar winner. The Gold Derby team (Anne Thompson, Dave Karger, Pete Hammond, Gene Seymour, Thelma Adams, et. al.) is giving Clint's film 4-to-5 odds to win. I
called it for
M$B over two months ago ("Game Over"), but I guess I don't need to point that out.
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 8:48 AM on Friday, February 18, 2005
As long as we're doing turnarounds, allow me to offer one of my own (although it's way too late in the game for it to mean anything): Clint Eastwood delivered a finer thing with
M$B than Scorsese did with
The Aviator, but it would be really nice all around if Scorsese were to win the Best Director Oscar. I just watched those making-of docs by Laurent Bouzerau on the new two-disc
Raging Bull...
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posted by Jeffrey Wells at 8:39 AM on Friday, February 18, 2005
Those one-sheets and web ads announcing Gore Verbinski's
The Weather Man (Paramount) as an April 1st release are now officially
redundant . The Nic Cage/Michael Caine/Hope Davis drama about a Chicago TV weather man with personal problems galore has been bumped to the fall. The idea, apparently, is that a strong drama with prestige elements will have a better shot in September or October. There's also some new thought being given to the
Weather Man ad campaign image (i.e., Cage with a splattered milk shake dripping from his left shoulder), which obviously suggests comedy.
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 7:32 PM on Thursday, February 17, 2005
A Warner Home Video press release issued a couple of months ago about the upcoming double-disc "special edition" Heat DVD said that disc #2 would offer "11 additional scenes." Bunk...
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 7:02 PM on Thursday, February 17, 2005
I always feel better when HBO's Real Time with Bill Maher is up and rolling...kind of rounds out my sense of all being right with the world. Anyway, it preems tonight (Friday, 2.11) at 11 pm. But what to make of the new Robert Evans talk show thing on Sirius? For this to be semi-interesting, Evans would have to be paying attention to what's doing right now -- he'd have to be up on things. The President's Day debut is on Monday, 2.21, at 6 pm ET. The regular show will play on Saturday. It starts on March 5th, 6 pm.
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 5:20 PM on Thursday, February 17, 2005
"You may recall that in the
Matrix trilogy, Keanu Reeves played a haunted, expressionless traveler between metaphysical realms whose mission was to unravel a vast, complicated plot to...well, to do something very bad involving a lot of computer-generated imagery,"
New York Times critic A.O. Scott begins in his review of
Constantine...
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posted by Jeffrey Wells at 3:53 PM on Thursday, February 17, 2005
All-Time Downers
There are at least three ways to have a depressing time at the movies, and one is worth the grief.
You can sit through something shoddy, inept, sub-standard, and do everything you can to flush it out of your system when it's over. You can also sit through a smooth, studio-funded, well-made enterprise that everyone's loving and is making money hand over fist, but which you happen to despise with every fibre of your being. (For me, that would be....naaah, I've said it too many times before.)
...
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posted by Jeffrey Wells at 1:13 PM on Wednesday, February 16, 2005
Here's a Chris Rock observation from that same
Entertainment Weekly/Josh Wolk interview that started all the trouble...or rather, the interview that gave Matt Drudge the opportunity to selectively quote from and ignite all the trouble out of context. Wolk asks Rock if he thinks movies are "better or worse than they used to be?" and Rock answers, "Definitely worse. Studios used to make visions. When a director has control, what you're seeing on the screen is a vision. Now what you see is a consensus. There's a big difference.
Sideways is a vision.
The Day After Tomorrow...
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posted by Jeffrey Wells at 4:39 AM on Wednesday, February 16, 2005
Give Constantine this much: after who knows how many hundreds of mainstream films over the last 60 or 70 years that have essentially served as advertisements for the existential coolness of sucking in cigarette smoke, here's a flick in which the hero (Keanu Reeves) is presented as inescapably doomed because he's been smoking since he was 15. I stopped smoking eons ago, but I've gone back to it now and then, and this movie made me feel horrible about this. I can't remember a more effective anti-smoking argument projected on a big screen.
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 4:20 AM on Wednesday, February 16, 2005
How's this for a Howard Hughes triple bill at the American Cinematheque somewhere down the road? Open with Martin Scorsese's The Aviator, follow up with Edward Dmytryk's The Carpetbaggers (1964), featuring the always-icy George Peppard as a cold, misogynistic movie mogul-slash-industrialist, a character based on Hughes, and conclude the evening with Jonathan Demme's Melvin and Howard (1980), mostly about a middle-class American schlub (Paul LeMat) but featuring an inspired Jason Robards cameo perf as a rickety, weather-beaten, half-looney Hughes.
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 3:12 PM on Tuesday, February 15, 2005
The mentality of those 77 year-olds who've bristled at Oscar Awards emcee Chris Rock's comments about the show ("It's a fashion show" that's "mostly for gay people") and who are muttering that he's "not suitable for the job" (according to
Hollywood Reporter columnist Martin Grove)...this harumph-y attitude is precisely why the Oscar Awards are seen as going downhill and increasingly irrelevant. Especially now that the specifics of Rock's comments in the
Entertainment Weekly interview (offered
here ...
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posted by Jeffrey Wells at 1:21 PM on Tuesday, February 15, 2005
A non-scientific
Newsweek/MSNBC poll has asked readers which super-expensive popcorn movie they'd most like to see in 2005, and right now (Tuesday, 2.15, 9:37 am) the most eagerly awaited (favored by 32% of voters) is George Lucas's
Star Wars III: Revenge of the Sith (20th Century Fox, 5.19). Mike Newell's
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (WB, 11.18) is the second most anticipated with 18%, Tim Burton's
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (WB, 7.15) is third with 11%, and Steven Spielberg's
War of the Worlds (Paramount, 6.29) is fourth with 10%. Peter Jackson's
King Kong...
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posted by Jeffrey Wells at 9:35 AM on Tuesday, February 15, 2005
"When you say 'no' a lot as an actor, you're going to go broke, and that's been the hardest thing to go through in the last ten years,"
Sideways costar Virginia Madsen says in a recent
Guardian...
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posted by Jeffrey Wells at 7:33 AM on Monday, February 14, 2005
So Lewis Beale and his
New York Times editors plugged me,
Variety's Pete Hammond, Gold Derby.com's Tom O'Neill and blogger Emanuel Levy in Sunday's (2.13) piece about
Oscar prognosticators ...but they cut Movie City News' David Poland, which, by anyone's barometer, makes it an incomplete presentation.
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 8:34 AM on Saturday, February 12, 2005
"There's a difference in how I vote on my ballot and how I vote in the office pool," an Academy voter tells
Fade In writer Nelson Handel. It would be better if the Oscar awards were only voted upon by peers "but it'll never happen," the voter admits. "Everyone enjoys voting, and won't be dissuaded by the fact they they're ignorant." The entire piece, which has been getting a fair amount of attention over the last week or so, can be found
here .
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 4:53 PM on Friday, February 11, 2005
Eucalyptus is the title of a Jocelyn Moorhouse-Fox Searchlight film that was recently put on hold because the script isn't ready yet. Actually, because star and executive producer Russell Crowe had problems with it. The film, which would have costarred Nicole Kidman, is about "an Australian widower who plants hundreds of eucalyptus trees on his land," according to a Reuters news story "He tests his daughter's suitors by making them identify every species. One succeeds, but by then Ellen (Kidman) already has lost her heart to a handsome stranger (Crowe)." I'm sorry, but that sounds like fanciful chick-movie horeshit.
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 4:18 PM on Friday, February 11, 2005
My most affecting Arthur Miller moment was seeing Death of a Salesman in '84 on Broadway, with Dustin Hoffman as Willy Loman and a 30 year-old, totally-on-fire John Malkovich as Biff. Miller led an amazing life in an incredibly rich and turbulent time, and now, at age 89, he's no longer among us. Nothing recedes likes success, but rest comes to us all.
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 2:55 PM on Friday, February 11, 2005
Damn Numbers
It was being predicted a couple of weeks ago that the February 27th Oscar telecast will be among the lowest-rated in history, if not
the lowest rated. Are we supposed to be concerned? All right, let's say we are.
In the early to mid 1930s, back when Irving Thalberg had something to say about the way this town was being run, the Oscars were intended as a classy promotion for the studio's higher-quality films.
...
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posted by Jeffrey Wells at 12:43 PM on Friday, February 11, 2005
David Poland has written about Martin Scorsese's tribute to the spirit that propelled Howard Hughes: "Better than any of the other movies nominated,
The Aviator offers a look at us...at the power of outrageous daring...not just of one man, but of a culture that shouts our aspirations across the globe." To which I must reply, "Better than any of the other movies nominated,
The Aviator...
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posted by Jeffrey Wells at 1:49 PM on Thursday, February 10, 2005
The
obiter dicta (i.e., words in passing) in Brian Lowry's recently posted
Variety review of
Constantine (Warner Bros., 2.18) sounds somewhat predictable: "Pic does win a few points for style if not substance." The opening graph, though, has a strong alliterative punch: "Keanu Reeves' latest man-in-black fantasy is slightly better than
The Matrix...
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posted by Jeffrey Wells at 8:15 AM on Thursday, February 10, 2005
Thing Ding
When a movie is working with an audience, you can feel it.
I'm not talking about an opinion. You're there and people are beaming and laughing and giving standing ovations when it's over, and you can sense it coming out of every pore in the room. Guys like Variety's Robert Koehler can pooh-pooh all they want and it doesn't matter -- a hit is a hit is a hit.
This is the bottom-line deal with Paul Reiser's The Thing About My Folks...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 11:46 PM on Tuesday, February 8, 2005
I'm a little concerned about Cate Blanchett winning the Best Supporting Actress trophy at the SAG Awards last night. Did she beat out Virginia Madsen (far and away the most deserving contender, as almost all the critics' groups have proclaimed) because the SAG membership had some kind of collective understanding that the ensemble acting award would go to the cast of
Sideways...
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posted by Jeffrey Wells at 11:24 AM on Sunday, February 6, 2005
In the obits for the recently-deceased John Vernon, everyone mentioned his role as Dean Wormer in
Animal House. Almost no one, of course, mentioned his two finest roles -- Maynard Boyle, the Reno-based mob guy in Don Siegel's
Charley Varrick ('73), and Mal Reese, Lee Marvin's cowardly betrayer in John Boorman's
Point Blank ('67). There's a transcendent moment in
Varrick...
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posted by Jeffrey Wells at 5:34 PM on Saturday, February 5, 2005
Have the right-wing attacks against Million Dollar Baby (or the import of its ending, rather) given any kind of advantage to The Aviator? I am of the firm opinion that The Aviator has no chance to take the Best Picture Oscar...none. There is a slim chance that a last-minute surge of sympathy for Martin Scorsese (with everyone starting to realize that The Aviator is finished, and wanting to do something for poor Scorsese after all...despite the indications of Clint Eastwood's DGA Best Director win) has begun to manifest....maybe. I'm attributing this development to last Tuesday's release of the two-disc
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 5:19 PM on Saturday, February 5, 2005
Strange Invaders
There’s no telling how good or even credible Timothy Hines' screen adaptation of H.G. Wells’
The War of the Worlds will be, but it’s hard not to sympathize with any David facing a Goliath...especially when the kid with the slingshot got rolling on his project first.
...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 1:21 PM on Friday, February 4, 2005
Sharon’s Book
The first thing that got me about Sharon Waxman’s
Rebels on the Backlot (Harper Entertainment) was its assurance. It’s a very smooth and soothing read.
Call me a plebeian but I love inside-the-beltway books that deliver that massage-y, cruise-control, we-know-everything feeling (like Peter Biskind’s Down and Dirty Pictures and David Thomson’s The Whole Equation did) along with...you know, the other standard virtues.
Three Kings director David O. Russell, star George Clooney during the problematic (some would say tumultuous) shooting.
...
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posted by Jeffrey Wells at 8:16 AM on Wednesday, February 2, 2005
At the Santa Barbara Film Festival last Sunday I asked
Sideways star Paul Giamatti why he didn't get nominated for Best Actor. In so doing I aired my pet theory, which is that Academy voters of a certain age resented his Miles character stealing money from his mother's bedroom bureau. Since then
New York Times...
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posted by Jeffrey Wells at 7:02 AM on Wednesday, February 2, 2005
In his comment following an Ain't It Cool riff on last Saturday's writer's panel at the Santa Barbara Film Festival, Drew McWeeny (a.k.a., "Moriarty") wrote, "I heard that Jeffrey Wells tried to shout down John Logan at one point about
The Aviator...
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posted by Jeffrey Wells at 2:54 PM on Tuesday, February 1, 2005
"My most embarrassing moment in Hollywood was an interview with Jim Carrey that at least absolved me of star fever,"
New York Times reporter Bernie Weinraub has written in a farewell piece. "The comedian, in a suite at Ma Maison Sofitel, was promoting his film
The Mask...
Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 2:11 PM on Tuesday, February 1, 2005
A bogus AP headline about Leonardo DiCaprio's receiving the Platinum Award from the Santa Barbara International Film Festival last Sunday evening has led certain media commentators to smirk at the concept of giving the 30 year-old DiCaprio a "Life Achievement Award." That term doesn't apply, of course, as it was never used by the festival organizers.
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 1:44 PM on Tuesday, February 1, 2005
It's a shame that the righties are hammering away at Million Dollar Baby over ...well, the life-and-death issue raised in the film's third act. (I refuse to spoil, even though the cat's totally out of the bag.) Not because the righties are wrong in their views about this, but because they've diminished the viewing experience for the millions who've yet to see it. That's really crappy and I'm sorry. For a thorough reading of the hard-right position on this matter, check out Garret Keiser's article ("Life Everlasting: The Religious Right and the Right to Die") in the current edition of Harper's.
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 1:31 PM on Tuesday, February 1, 2005
