Truman Show
I've seen Bennett Miller's Capote (Sony Classics, 9.30) twice now, and I'm afraid I've got it bad. I love this film...so much that my reasons for feeling this way are a bit more personal than usual.
Why get into it now, a little more than four weeks before it opens? Because I'm in Toronto and for me, the festival has begun (advance screenings are happening left and right for local press), and because everyone will be giving Capote pats on the back once the festival starts on 9.9 so I might as well pat first.
...
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posted by Jeffrey Wells at 1:42 PM on Wednesday, August 31, 2005
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 6:10 AM on Monday, August 29, 2005
Curtis Hanson's
In Her Shoes (20th Century Fox, 10.7) is on the longish side (a bit more than 140 minutes) but don't let that temper your enthusiasm, says an overseas distribution guy who saw it a couple of weeks ago. "I really, really liked it," he says. "It's very well-written" -- Jennifer Weiner's book has been adapted by
Erin Brockovich...
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posted by Jeffrey Wells at 3:35 PM on Sunday, August 28, 2005
I don't care that much one way or the other, but the new Bob Iger-led Disney has apparently smoothed things over with Pixar and the word is that reps for the companies are negotiating the fine points of a fresh new deal, so it looks like Pixar and Disney won't be separating after all. Take it with a grain, but that's I'm hearing.
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 3:31 PM on Sunday, August 28, 2005
It's ironic to say the least that with the divorce between Harvey and Bob Weinstein and Disney about to be over and done with and in effect, the talk is now that Disney is finalizing a deal to handle overseas distribution for four films made by Bob and Harvey's new outfit, The Weinstein Co., and that the deal will be signed within the next two or three months. The Weinstein Co. films we're speaking of are Derailed, Breaking and Entering, Scary Movie 4 and the Sin City sequel.
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 3:25 PM on Sunday, August 28, 2005
What's more pathetic? Director Martin Campbell and producers Michael Wilson and Barbara Broccoli
still trying to figure out which semi-acceptable (i.e., not a complete unknown, and faux-studly in the Sean Connery mold) candidate they should sign and turn into the next James Bond, or the fact that journalists are still writing articles about this embarassing process? The latest indication of the latter is this
article ("Search for a Swoonmaker") from Australia's
The Age...
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posted by Jeffrey Wells at 1:53 PM on Sunday, August 28, 2005
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 2:17 PM on Friday, August 26, 2005
Ruffians
It's doesn't aspire to high art or try for the sort of emotional engagement that makes you choke up, but Lexi Alexander's Green Street Hooligans (Odd Lot, 9.9) is nonetheless a very intense emotional hybrid thing, which is to say a sports movie and a bloody gang-violence movie mashed into one.
...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 10:08 AM on Friday, August 26, 2005
Tracking says the biggest earner this weekend -- oddly, given the buzz -- will be Terry Gilliam's The Brothers Grimm. Awareness last weekend was at 76%, definite interest was at 41% and those saying it would be their first choice stood at 17%.
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 3:08 PM on Wednesday, August 24, 2005
Change of Season
The winding down of the '05 summer is fortunate in two respects: it's getting a tiny bit cooler in the city (there was a transcendent breeze travelling southward down Broadway Monday night around 9:30 pm), and it gives me something to write about during a flat week.
It felt to me like an above-average summer. At the end of each year I always come up with a list of 40 or 45 films that were good, very good or excellent, and here we had a summer...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 2:42 PM on Wednesday, August 24, 2005
The latest Telluride Film Festival lineup is as follows: Robert Towne's Ask the Dust, Be With Me (from Singapore), The Bee Season, Neil Jordan's Breakfast on Pluto, Ang Lee's Brokeback Mountain, Liev Schreiber's Everything is Illuminated, Live and Become (a French-Israeli production), Merry Christmas, Paradise Now, John Turturro's Romance and Cigarettes, and a film from Cameroon called Sisters in Law. The festival runs from Friday, 9.2 through Monday, 9.5. I never manage to get there because it's too costly, but someday...
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 4:03 PM on Tuesday, August 23, 2005
There doesn't seem to be any denying that the buying of movie ads in newspapers is starting to taper off and that the studio marketers are looking more and more to digital ads on niche internet websites. In last week's Nikki Finke
column ("Hollywood to Newsosaurs: Drop Dead") in the
L.A. Weekly...
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posted by Jeffrey Wells at 2:49 PM on Monday, August 22, 2005
Matt Damon doesn't want to hear about Ben Affleck going through any career slump. "People forget that Ben is a terrific actor," Damon
tells Chicago Sun Times reporter Cindy Pearlman. "And maybe through some fault of his own, Ben hasn't made the best choices in the last couple of years. I ust think it'll be funny when his new movie,
Truth, Justice, and the American Way...
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posted by Jeffrey Wells at 8:34 AM on Monday, August 22, 2005
Screenwriter
Josh Friedman's blog,
"I find your lack of faith disturbing." is a well-written, refreshingly frank look into his struggle to get credit for writing
War of the Worlds, his face off with David Koepp, and his epiphanies about the industry. "Because if there's a lesson it's this: you can be David Koepp or Josh Friedman or f***ing Shakespeare...If you're a screenwriter you're a screenwriter and if you want people to give you love at your premiere you better bring 'em with you."
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 1:30 AM on Monday, August 22, 2005
Harold Becker and Al Pacino are onto a good thing in remaking Jules Dassin's
Rififi (1955), a classic noir famous for a totally silent heist sequence that lasts roughly 30 minutes...no dialogue or music and next to no "action," but hypnotic from start to finish. Brian DePalma shot a vaguely similar sequence in the first
Mission Impossible...
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posted by Jeffrey Wells at 10:26 AM on Sunday, August 21, 2005
This is why I love...no,
worship Terry Gilliam. In an interview with the
San Francisco Chronicle's
Hugh Hart, Gilliam says "he hates most computer-generated imagery. He hated
The Patriot, though he grew to love its star, Heath Ledger. He thinks mammoth battle sequences have been 'done to death,' doesn't like
Men in Black's 'smart-ass' humor [and] has no patience for 'macho' action movies." Yes! But on the other hand...
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 10:10 AM on Sunday, August 21, 2005
"Whether I like it or not, or whether anybody else does, when I start a film I have a few ideas," Gilliam tells
Hart in the same piece. "And as you're getting into it, you think, 'Ooh, there's another idea,' and you're shooting some more and, 'Oh, here's another thing. Let's do that.' I'm always changing and adding. That's just the way my mind works." And that's pretty much why, I gather, Gilliam's
The Brother Grimm...
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posted by Jeffrey Wells at 9:47 AM on Sunday, August 21, 2005
It's time to admit something and be done with it. I've been a big fan of
My Date With Drew...
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posted by Jeffrey Wells at 5:08 PM on Saturday, August 20, 2005
"I never found a companion who was as companionable as solitude." I wish I wasn't quoting someone...
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 5:05 PM on Saturday, August 20, 2005
I was feeling fairly revved about Rachel McAdams after seeing her in
The Wedding Crashers in July, and now, after catching her in
Red Eye...
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posted by Jeffrey Wells at 3:55 PM on Saturday, August 20, 2005
This is kind of a
Defamer-ish thing but here goes:
Hollywood Interrupted's Mark Ebner is
reporting that a Paramount Pictures staffer has told him that 50 Cent has very impressive equipment. The Paramount guy's opinion is based, says Ebner, on having seen full-frontal footage of the rapper in Jim Sheridan's
Get Rich or Die Tryin' (opening 11.9), an urban biopic in which 50 Cent plays himself. Ebner says Paramounters "
have seen much of
Get Rich...
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posted by Jeffrey Wells at 3:06 PM on Saturday, August 20, 2005
I'm sorry to say this because I'm a Rotten Tomatoes man all the way, but there's something
very wrong somewhere when
The 40 Year-Old Virgin is, according to these guys,
the best-reviewed film of the year so far with a 90% positive. Can't they fix these figures or something? Even though
Virgin's rating has dropped to 89% since this announcement was posted, let's consider a few things. One, RT's review poll only considers the wide releases (no platforms, no little indie releases) which means a higher piece-of-shit percentage. Two,
The Forty Year-Old Virgin...
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posted by Jeffrey Wells at 2:14 PM on Saturday, August 20, 2005
Not Bali Hai
Steve James' Reel Paradise is lying in wait at your local theatre like a King Cobra. Buy a ticket and watch it and it will bite you and poison to death any Marlon Brando Mutiny on the Bounty South Sea island fantasies you may be nurturing.
Paradise...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 11:31 AM on Friday, August 19, 2005
Not Bali Hai
Steve James' Reel Paradise is lying in wait at your local theatre like a King Cobra. Buy a ticket and watch it and it will bite you and poison to death any Marlon Brando Mutiny on the Bounty South Sea island fantasies you may be nurturing in your soul.
Paradise...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 10:56 AM on Friday, August 19, 2005
I don't understand why the crowd at the Manhattan all-media screening of Judd Apatow's
The 40 Year-Old Virgin...
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posted by Jeffrey Wells at 11:12 AM on Thursday, August 18, 2005
Time's Richard Corliss
writes that a generic Ralph Fiennes performance -- and particularly the very fine one he gives in
The Constant Gardener...
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posted by Jeffrey Wells at 10:46 AM on Thursday, August 18, 2005
I'm finding this obviously way early and
somewhat snarky pan of Doug McGrath's
Have You Heard? (Warner Independent, 9.06), written by Leon Neyfakh and appearing in the 8.22
New York Observer, a tiny bit curious, given the positive things I've been hearing all along about McGrath's script....but you never know.
Have You Heard? (formerly known as
Every Word Is True) is the "other" Truman Capote biopic that Warner Independent is holding back from release until late next year so as not to get into a pissing match with Bennett Miler's
Capote...
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posted by Jeffrey Wells at 10:01 AM on Thursday, August 18, 2005
Any e-mails anyone might have sent over the last two or three days of a pressing nature, please re-send them as my inbox has again been erased and I'm starting out clean as of this morning...thanks.
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 9:58 AM on Thursday, August 18, 2005
Critical Mass
Is there anyone out there looking forward to a slew of 9.11 movies next year?
Okay, maybe "slew" isn't quite accurate, but there are at least two solid 9/11 features in the pipeline and there's a third one trying to finalize a script and get rolling, and they're all funded by major studios. Plus there's an ABC-TV miniseries and maybe one or two others looking to commemorate (i.e., cash in on) the 5th anniversary of that nightmare, and all but one is slated to open in mid to late '06.
...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 4:32 PM on Wednesday, August 17, 2005
ThinkFilm will be putting Keith Beauchamp's
The Untold Story of Emmett Louis Till...
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posted by Jeffrey Wells at 10:30 AM on Monday, August 15, 2005
I'm seeing
The 40 year-old Virgin this evening, at which point I'll fully consider Henry Cabot Beck's
claim
about costar Catherine Keener in Sunday's
N.Y. Daily News...
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posted by Jeffrey Wells at 8:42 AM on Monday, August 15, 2005
Broadway's latest jukebox musical -- Don Scardino's
Lennon -- opened last night and, as expected, was critically savaged. Lennon's widow Yoko Ono had her hands all over this, and if you know how things usually work you know any kind of tribute piece (movie, stage musical) about a deceased artist that's been approved by a surviving wife of family member will always be maudlin. I love Ben Brantley's opening graph in his
New York Times review...
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posted by Jeffrey Wells at 7:19 AM on Monday, August 15, 2005
This originated around 7.25, but a Lebanon-based blogger named Matthew who doesn't like readers to know his last name ("Matthew in Beirut") has posted a series of
frame captures taken from a worse-than-usual bootleg DVD of
Revenge of the Sith, and it has some English-to-Chinese and then back-to-English subtitles that are quite...uh, well, idiotic but funny.
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 7:02 AM on Monday, August 15, 2005
Went to The Aristocrats at a multiplex just of Union Square on Saturday night, and it was just about sold out and damned if the audience wasn't laughing its ass off, particularly a couple of girls who were sitting right behind us. The ThinkFilm release averaged a bit over $10,000 per screen last weekend at 72 situations, and has earned $1.5 millon so far. But don't pop the champagne just yet because the red-state rurals aren't expected to be as receptive as the city slickers have been, according to conventional wisdom.
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 6:40 PM on Sunday, August 14, 2005
No biggie but vaguely bothersome: two days ago Dark Horizons
linked to Thursday's story in the
N.Y. Daily News (actually in Rush and Molloy's column) that Steven Spielberg will be directing Liam Neeson as Abraham Lincoln in a biopic starting in the spring '06. I ran the Neeson-Lincoln story
a day before Rush and Molloy, having spoken to Neeson about it at a
Constant Gardener party last Monday.
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 8:15 AM on Sunday, August 14, 2005
Jack Matthews has supplied a heartfelt, nicely-written
profile of
Brothers Grimm director Terry Gilliam in today's
N.Y. Daily News. There's no reading this and not falling in love all over again with Gilliam's scrappy way of dealing with studio chiefs like Miramax's Bob Weinstein, who was in Gilliam's face over this and that during the '03
Grimm...
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posted by Jeffrey Wells at 7:20 AM on Sunday, August 14, 2005
What's the first thing anyone does when they go into a DVD store? They head for the rack with the just-out releases to they can scan the jacket covers, etc. Everyone in the world does this, but there is no DVD-fan website I know of that displays
jacket cover art of the latest DVDs at the top of its main page. All the major DVD sites list new releases, but you have to search around for them...which is not analagous to your typical DVD store experience. That said,
DVD Journal...
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posted by Jeffrey Wells at 7:02 AM on Sunday, August 14, 2005
It sounds way unlikely, but Nicole Lampert of London's
Daily Mail is
reporting...
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posted by Jeffrey Wells at 6:44 AM on Sunday, August 14, 2005
Eat Me
Here we go with another sad-irony weekend at the box-office...
The big openers are Four Brothers (spirited action crap), Asylum (British wife self-destructs from hunger for crazy sex with an emotionally unstable asylum inmate), Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo (simian-level geek-sex comedy), The Great Raid (passable, historically-invested World War II heroism drama), Pretty Persuasion (cynical time-waster about a pair of soulless manipulative high-school heathers) and The Skeleton Key (disposable southern horror crapola).
And oh, yeah...Werner Herzog's Grizzly Man...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 11:50 AM on Friday, August 12, 2005
Ang Lee's Brokeback Mountain (Focus Features, 12.9), the "gay cowboy" movie with Jake Gyllenhaal and Heath Ledger, will have its first-anywhere showing at the Telluride Film Festival, I've been told. The four-day festival will unspool Friday, September 2nd and conclude on Monday, September 5th. Brokeback will also visit the Toronto Film Festival.
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 1:44 PM on Thursday, August 11, 2005
There's also talk about some kind of informal screening of Robert Towne's
Ask the Dust...
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posted by Jeffrey Wells at 1:42 PM on Thursday, August 11, 2005
Alright already...so Rockaway beach with the lousy waves is in Queens and not Brooklyn. I don't get it. I'm in my neck of Brooklyn, which is Williamsburg, and I head southeast and go to a beach not that far from Coney Island and I'm in friggin' Queens? I thought Brooklyn had the southwest of Manhattan area across the East River area and Queens had the area due east and that was that.
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 7:22 PM on Wednesday, August 10, 2005
Nothing kills your interest in seeing a new film faster than to watch a trailer that has that oozing maple-syrup narration from that guy...that cloying, raspy-voiced bullshit artist who always narrates these things. And those grotesque Hallmark platitudes they always have him say...to think that someone actually gets paid to write this crap...amazing! It's all in this
trailer for Lasse Hallstrom's
An Unfinished Life (Miramax, 9.9).
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 3:38 PM on Wednesday, August 10, 2005
Love Come Lately
I've already mentioned I was pretty much blown away by Fernando Meirelles' The Constant Gardener (Focus Features, 8.26). What's hitting me now about this film has more to do with irony.
Gardener is essentially a political murder-mystery that achieves a very unique payoff because it also invests in an unusual kind of love story (i.e., a widower falling more profoundly in love with his wife after she's dead than when she was alive).
The Constant Gardener director Fernando Meirelles, during interview in Regency hotel lounge -- Tuesday, 8.9, 4:25 pm.
In so doing Gardener...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 1:51 PM on Wednesday, August 10, 2005
That questionable-from-the-get-go hoax theory about
The Aristocrats has been definitively debunked and the charges withdrawn. This revised Wikipedia
entry has links to the evidence.
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 8:55 AM on Wednesday, August 10, 2005
I should have linked to this
piece two weeks ago when it first popped up on Slate, but it's extremely thorough and brilliant here and there and deserves everyone's attention. Written by Field Maloney, the article (called "The O Factor: Was Owen Wilson the key to the Wes Anderson phenomenon?") wonders if the biggest problem with
The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou was Anderson's having co-written it with Noah Baumbach and not Wilson. The theory is gaining some ground as people recall the reaction to Baumbach's
The Squid and the Whale...
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posted by Jeffrey Wells at 8:36 AM on Wednesday, August 10, 2005
The punctuation police have finally gotten through to George Clooney and his producers, the result being that his Edward R. Murrow drama is now being presented as Good Night, And Good Luck, and not, as they had it before, Good Night. And, Good Luck...which was awful.
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 7:38 AM on Wednesday, August 10, 2005
Is this going to be an awesome Toronto Film Festival or what? The selections will include Cameron Crowe's
Elizabethtown with Orlando Bloom and Kirsten Dunst; Steven Soderbergh's
Bubble; Tim Burton's
The Corpse Bride; Michael Winterbottom's
Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story; George Clooney's
Good Night, And Good Luck; Mary Harron's
The Notorious Bettie Page with the rediscovered Gretchen Mol; Liev Schrieber's
Everything is Illuminated; John Turturro's
Romance & Cigarettes with James Gandolfini, Susan Sarandon and Kate Winslet; Abel Ferrara's
Mary; Stephen Frears'
Mrs. Henderson Presents; Phyllis Nagy's
...
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posted by Jeffrey Wells at 6:52 AM on Wednesday, August 10, 2005
Earlier this summer a few sci-fi geek sites covered pretty well the similarities between
The Island and a 1979 low-budget sci-fi flick called
Clonus (a.k.a.,
Parts: The Clonus Horror )), which came out on DVD last March. I summarized the claims in a
piece that ran in this space on 7.8. And now the producers of the earlier film have
gone to court to sue DreamWorks and Warner Bros. over the alleged ripoff. In a suit filed last Monday (8.8) in federal court in Manhattan,
Clonusproducers Myrl A. Schreibman and Robert S. Fiveson (a) asserted that
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posted by Jeffrey Wells at 6:06 AM on Wednesday, August 10, 2005
The high-def DVD format war is not coming to an end and may extend another year or two...to everyone's disappointment. I went down to Sony Studios a few months ago to see a demonstration of Sony's Blu Ray high-def DVD (i.e., footage from
Lawrence of Arabia...
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posted by Jeffrey Wells at 5:50 AM on Wednesday, August 10, 2005
I've been slow to pick up on the fact that Stephen Gaghan's Syriana, the Middle Eastern espionage drama about CIA complacency with George Clooney and Matt Damon, has been held back. It now has a limited release date of 11.23 and will open wide on 12.9.
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 5:38 AM on Wednesday, August 10, 2005
So The Weinstein Company has four films going to the Toronto Film Festival -- (1) John Madden's
Proof; (2)
Transamerica, a tranny comedy-drama from Duncan Ticker and starring Felicity Huffman; (3) Richard Shepard's
Matador with Pierce Brosnan and Greg Kinnear; and (4) Stephen Frears'
Mrs. Henderson Presents...
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posted by Jeffrey Wells at 11:53 AM on Tuesday, August 9, 2005
"Hollywood is wondering just what, precisely, is going wrong -- not just with
The Island and
Stealth but with the whole high-octane action/adventure/sci-fi genre to which they belong,"
Hollywood Reporter's Nicole Sperling
observes. People are worried, in other words, that audiences aren't lining up to see crap like they used to. Since the dawn of the blockbuster mentality 30 years ago (born of the mega-successes of
Jaws in '75 and
Star Wars...
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posted by Jeffrey Wells at 1:35 PM on Monday, August 8, 2005
Lasse Hallstrom's
An Unfinished Life, one of the films that Miramax shelved last year and is now finally getting released before their Disney contract comes to a close, is opening on September 9.9. Like 98% of the other films coming out in September and October,
Life has its own website...or at least a
page on the Miramax site. And yet John Madden's
Proof, another holdover that Miramax is releasing on 9.16, or just a week after the Hallstrom film, doesn't have a page on the company site, much less a website of its own.
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 9:41 AM on Monday, August 8, 2005
Carroll Ballard's
Duma, a $12 million family film that's won praise from critic Scott Foundas and a three-and-a-half-star rating from Roger Ebert, has been getting the brush-off from Warner Bros, according to this August 8th
L.A. Daily News story by Glenn Whipp. The studio opened it in five Chicago theatres last weekend, and "if it does well, it will expand to other cities, including Los Angeles," WB's distribution honcho Dan Fellman told Whipp. Another little film getting the blow-off treatment is 20th Century Fox's
Little Manhattan...
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posted by Jeffrey Wells at 6:34 AM on Monday, August 8, 2005
Eisner, Ovitz, Semel, Diller, Katzenberg, Geffen, Guber...riding off into the sunset, their eras drawing to a close. "In the same way that audiences have lost their taste for film, filmmakers have lost their passion," says David Thomson, author of "The Whole Equation: A History of Hollywood." "It is not surprising that some of the moguls are giving up as well. They are as depressed and tired of the business as the rest of us." This from a sharp and concise
sum-up piece by David Carr in the
New York Times...worth reading.
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 6:18 AM on Monday, August 8, 2005
Scratch that $32 million-or-so projection for The Dukes of Hazzard. Saturday's (i.e., yesterday's) earnings were only $9.4 million compared to Friday's $11.9 million, which is a drop of about 21%, which means the word-of-mouth is catching up with it fairly fast. Warner Bros. may or may not try to report a $30 million weekend later today, but either way it'll fall short of that figure. Next weekend's business will probably drop over 50%..fast burn.
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 7:51 AM on Sunday, August 7, 2005
The Dukes of Hazzard is killing 'em in the boonies but not as much in the big blue cities. It did $11.9 million on Friday, and will probably wind up with $32 or $33 million for the weekend, but it's playing "very rural," I'm told. Whatever...that's a pretty good haul for a film as atrociously bad as this one. Meanwhile, Jim Jarmusch's
Broken Flowers...
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posted by Jeffrey Wells at 7:51 AM on Saturday, August 6, 2005
Too Brainy
There's a reason Jay Chanderasekhar's Super Troopers (2001) caught on -- the absolute go-for-broke, beyond-hope stupidity of the characters. A similar thing worked for the Farrelly's Dumb and Dumber and, going way back, Bill Pullman's "Earl Mott" character in Ruthless People
If you really get it, deep-down genetic stupidity can be hilarious. And I don't mean stupid-but-cool and not cleverly stupid and not uneducated but street smart...I mean, forget-about-it brontosaurus dumb. But you have to go all the way, and that's what Chanderasekhar didn't do when he shot The Dukes of Hazzard.
The Dukes of Hazzard
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 11:29 AM on Friday, August 5, 2005
The more I think about that
snaggle tooth sticking out of the mouth of Peter Jackson's big ape, the more uncomfortable I feel. (Go to "photos" on the official
website.) It's a hint, you see...a very slight indication of the emotional tone of Jackson's
King Kong...
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posted by Jeffrey Wells at 6:50 AM on Friday, August 5, 2005
The unfortunate Jackson auteurist element aside, most of us are still keen on seeinng the new
King Kong and especially the new
Warner Home Video double DVD of the original 1933 film coming out on 11.22.
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 6:37 AM on Friday, August 5, 2005
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 5:35 AM on Friday, August 5, 2005
I don't know
USA Today columnist Whitney Matheson and I figure she's got to have one or two things on the ball to land a gig with a serious nationwide publication, but her
stuff is depressingly shallow, inane...it's like a parody of a writer with some depth who's decided to put everyone on and pretend they're the emptiest, least interesting GenXer in the history of the planet. Really,
read some of this shit...it's mind-bending.
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 5:15 AM on Friday, August 5, 2005
This Mary McNamara
piece in the
Los Angeles Times is hilarious. It's basically a woe-is-me complaint about Focus Features having given her a mere 45 minutes to sit down with director Jim Jarmusch and discuss
Broken Flowers at the Chateau Marmont a few days ago. She says Jarmusch loosens up only at the very end, when there's five or ten minutes to go. Well, it's
always this way. McNamara is spoiled -- most of us get a lousy 20 minutes. It's been like this since...oh, roughly the late '80s? Mid '80s? I did an article for
Empire...
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posted by Jeffrey Wells at 4:51 AM on Friday, August 5, 2005
Hot Date
The youngish producers of a little movie called My Date With Drew (DEG, 8.5) -- Jon Gunn, Brian Herzlinger, Brett Winn and Kerry David -- have gone through an exhilarating ride as well as a cold and lonely one for the last 20 months or so, and it's all been paradoxical.
All the buyers liked or loved Drew but all but one said no to a theatrical release because they felt it looks and feels too much like reality TV. And yet there's no question this indie thing plays with 30-and-under audiences, and I mean in a big...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 8:50 AM on Wednesday, August 3, 2005
That
Lord of War trailer isn't the only cool thing coming out of this 9.16 Lion's Gate release. There's also that fascinating
one-sheet with the armament textures etched into Nic Cage's face.
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 12:59 PM on Tuesday, August 2, 2005
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 12:29 PM on Tuesday, August 2, 2005
All right, I'm sold...
Lord of War (Lions Gate, 9.16), a snarky-attitude comedy about weapons dealers, is going to be a guilty pleasure. The
trailer had me grinning from the get-go, and toying with the possibility that Andrew Niccol's film is better than William Freidkin's
Deal of the Century ('83), which trod on the same turf. Nic Cage, Ethan Hawke, Jared "large wang" Leto and Bridget Moynahan are the leads in the newbie. The only thing that scares me is the fact that Niccol also directed
Simone...
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posted by Jeffrey Wells at 11:59 AM on Tuesday, August 2, 2005
I haven't seen Steven Greenstreet's
This Divided State yet, but it looks like a pretty good red-state-vs.-blue-state doc and we're all into that, right? It's opening at San Francisco's Victoria theatre on 8.4 (wait a minute...isn't that a Thursday?) and will open at New York City's Quad on 8.19 and at the Fairfax on 9.9 and a lot of places in between. If anyone's seen it and wants to throw me a review, please do. And it's okay if you're a red-state bubba and you think it's crap or ungodly...just write it like you feel it.
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 11:40 AM on Tuesday, August 2, 2005
This morning the Oscar Balloon nominees went into the news ticker. From now until early March of '06, day in and day out you'll be seeing those nominees clickety-clacking their way across the top of this column...all part of a
new attention surge being devoted to this
very serious competition...
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posted by Jeffrey Wells at 11:33 AM on Tuesday, August 2, 2005
There are five or six reasons why Fernando Meirelles'
The Constant Gardener (Focus Features, 8.26) should immediately rank among film cognoscenti as one of the year's absolute best, and two of them are the cinematography by Cesar Charlone, who also shot Meirelles'
City of God, and the editing by Claire Simpson, whose best work before this was for Oliver Stone's
Salvador and Robert Towne's
Without Limits...
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posted by Jeffrey Wells at 10:16 AM on Tuesday, August 2, 2005
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 9:04 AM on Tuesday, August 2, 2005
"A Pirate Adventure As Authored By Malron Brando Is Coming To A Bookstore Near You"? Gotta watch those typos, Movie City News!
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 9:02 AM on Tuesday, August 2, 2005
MSNBC's Eric Lundegaard has written an
odd piece called "10 Sexy Movie Broads." His definition of sexy is pretty good ("Sexy is balance...cool and hot at the same time...interest and disinterest") but his selections are almost mind-blowing in their bizarre-itude. Sigourney Weaver is sexy when she's in outer space (
Alien,
Galaxy Quest...
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posted by Jeffrey Wells at 8:16 AM on Tuesday, August 2, 2005
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 7:39 AM on Tuesday, August 2, 2005
Reader Gabriel Neeb says that after a screening at the Seattle Film Festival,
Aristocrats director Paul Provenza was asked about footage he couldn't get in the film. "[He] named a sequence from an old episode of
The Odd Couple when Oscar and Felix are walking to a talent agent's office and pass a mother, father, and children walking out. Oscar and Felix walk in and the agent tells them that the group leaving the office was the '...Aristocrats. What a great act.'" This would definitely predate the Penn Jillette era, but a cursory search on the
Odd Couple...
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posted by Jeffrey Wells at 10:11 PM on Monday, August 1, 2005
Yes, Sienna Miller has been re-cast as '60s era Warholian pop star Edie Sedgwick in George Hickenlooper's
Factory Girl, but not because she's suddenly hot tabloid fodder. George Hickenlooper, the film's director, told me this morning that Miller was approached "a month ago" to reconsider taking the Sedgwick role after she had to back away from it last April due to having committed to perform in
As You Like It...
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posted by Jeffrey Wells at 11:08 AM on Monday, August 1, 2005
No question that Phil Morrison's
Junebug (Sony Classics, 8.3) is a gentle, exceptionally well-made and highly perceptive film about family relationships and the differences between urban and rural. The Stephen Holden blurb in David Halbfinger's
story in today's
New York Times...
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posted by Jeffrey Wells at 10:13 AM on Monday, August 1, 2005
New Line has changed the release date so many times on Tony Scott's
Domino that they're ticking people off. Me, for example. The latest shift was decided about two weeks ago, and now
Domino will open nationwide on October 14th. This requires an explanation from yours truly because in late June, right after Domino Harvey's death, I spoke to a New Line rep who told me the film's release was going back to the original August date of 8.19, and a few hours later I published a
story about this decision. New Line had originally slotted
Domino...
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posted by Jeffrey Wells at 8:19 AM on Monday, August 1, 2005
A new
conspiracy theory posits that Penn Jillette himself invented the Aristocrats joke, and convinced the world that it "has been with comics [for a long time]. [It] is a joke that is never told in public, a private joke for comedians, so you've never heard it before." I've searched high and low for any reference to it, but everything seems to be related to the movie.
Wikipedia says that in England the joke is called "The Debonaires," but I can't find proof of that, either.
Andy Baio of Waxy.com...
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posted by Jeffrey Wells at 8:03 AM on Monday, August 1, 2005
Those of you who may read the WIRED items in the RSS feed may not know that occasionally I (Jon Rahoi) drop one in here. If you see something that sounds radically unlike Jeff, come to the site and make sure it doesn't have my name by it before e-mailing him.
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 7:54 AM on Monday, August 1, 2005
