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)
The latest Lewbowski Fest happened in NYC about ten days ago, on 10.20 and 10.21, and it just hit me: why was there no documentary about this home-grown phenomenon on the just-out The Big LebowskiUniversal Home Video DVD (released 10.18)? They issued two different special editions (a regular-regular and an "achiever's" edition, which cost $34 and change) and obviously spent a good amount of coin promoting them, but they couldn't cut together a short piece about the Lebowski fans? Will Russell and Scott Shuffitt have been putting on Lebowskifests since '02, and they're obviously genuine and repeating. Fox...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 6:31 AM on Monday, October 31, 2005
I do believe in ghosts....I do believe in ghosts...I do, I do, I do, I do...I do believe in ghosts and always have, I swear. And be sure to click on the spooky audio slide show that accompanies this very ghostly story...sitting right there on the left margin.
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 8:04 PM on Sunday, October 30, 2005
Bob Berney's Picturehouse Films has shelled out $3.75 million to be the distributor of Robert Altman's A Prairie Home Companion, a feature based on Garrison Keillor's radio show. Meryl Streep, Kevin Kline, Lindsay Lohan, Tommy Lee Jones, Virginia Madsen, Woody Harrelson and John C. Reilly costar. Berney caught the film at a distributor screening in Manhattan last Thursday. (Another screening happened Friday in L.A.) Variety's Ian Mohr reports there was a bidding war, hence the nearly four million dollar fee. An impression was passed along by a couple of set-visit articles that Paul Thomas Anderson informally co-directed Prairie Home Companion, as...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 2:56 PM on Sunday, October 30, 2005
Here's that snarky 50 Cent toon off Zipperfish...finally found the link. Very funny stuff. I'll leave it to 50 Cent fans to determine how accurate and/or well researched.
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 2:49 PM on Sunday, October 30, 2005
Wow, did you read that undeniably dispiriting excerpt from Maureen Dowd's forthcoming book in Sunday's New York Times ("What's a Modern Girl To Do?"). The book is called "Are Men Necessary?: When Sexes Collide" (G.P. Putnam's Sons), and the subject is how today's younger women have totally shunned feminism and have reverted back to a 1950s sensibility -- catching a man, being demure, letting him pay and going shopping, etc. The subtext, of course, is basically Dowd's coming to terms with the probable fact that she's too intimidating to attract a suitably high-powered guy and keep him (i.e., persuade him...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 7:43 PM on Saturday, October 29, 2005
Gotta love that Bob Berney marketing audacity. Lay it on the line, sell the movie you have and damn the torpedoes.
I'm referring to Berney's decision to call a certain heart-warming, Israeli-produced film, which his company, Picturehouse Films, picked up for U.S. distribution a few months ago...a movie that, let's be honest, very few people other than Orthodox Jews in New York and Florida will want to see no matter what it's called...a movie that Berney, in his admirably mule-stubborn way, has decided to sell with its orig- inal title, which is...ready?...Ushpizin.
Look at the photo of the bearded, bug-eyed guy wearing a flannel shirt on this Yahoo news site page, and answer the following question honestly. We all need to try and look within, to always try to empathize with what the other guy is going through, etc., but that aside and solely on a visual first-impression basis, does the look in this guy's eyes freak you out? Just a tiny bit? Does he seem in any way, shape or form like the same guy who stuck a gun in his mouth in that phony mobile beach home in Lethal Weapon...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 1:52 PM on Saturday, October 29, 2005
Jim Choma's Florida-based Zipperfish site doesn't have an onsite search engine, but a week or so ago there was an inspired animated riff about 50 Cent and Get Rich or Die Tryin'...and now I can't find it and link to it. Very sharp stuff. Tell you what...watch this thing...a Zipperfish video clip of a newswoman having a Freudian slip moment. Choma (a.k.a. "Walrus") has a Friday night live-radio talk show on his site, which inspired me to get in touch. Choma then turned me on to Jeff Beard, a tech guy who lives in...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 12:40 PM on Saturday, October 29, 2005
Many thanks to the Toronto Star's esteemed movie critic and essayist Peter Howell for giving my upcoming internet radio show, "Elsewhere Live," a mention in yesterday's (Friday, 10.28) column. That said, I have no choice but to post a slight correction. "Elsewhere Live" -- an easily thing to listen to as long as you have Winamp and follow the instructions -- will begin on this site on Sunday, 11.20, and not tomorrow night, or Sunday the 30th, as promised by Peter's item. (I mentioned the 11.20 date in a Wired item posted a couple of days ago.) I could start...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 12:02 PM on Saturday, October 29, 2005
The trailer for Ben Younger's Prime (Universal, opening today) told you the film would be sitcommy and Nora Ephronish. And the trailer guys lied. (Big surprise!) They sold the set-up -- Jewish middle-aged Manhattan therapist (Meryl Streep) realizes that the much younger man that her 37 year-old patient (Uma Thurman) is having an affair with is her 23 year-old son (Bryan Greenberg) -- and, of course, ignored what the film is. Prime is, okay, slightly contrived but also an engaging, not boring, socially acute, well-performed New York adult romantic comedy. The issues are not just the difficulties in a hot love affair between...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 8:12 AM on Friday, October 28, 2005
If I wanted to just blurt it out and cut to the chase, I could say that Jarhead (Univ- ersal, 11.4) is nothing. But it's not entirely nothing -- it's the fall's first major what- the-hell-were-they-thinking? movie, and that ain't hay. Trust me, it's going to send tens of thousands of viewers out of theatres and into the street next weekend (it's tracking...it'll open) asking themselves this very question.
Oo-rahh...
Based on Anthony Swofford's first-person account of his experience as a Marine during the 1991 Gulf War, Jarhead was probably pitched to Universal execs as the first GenX war movie...the Nirvana...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 11:59 PM on Thursday, October 27, 2005
Anyone who's seen the Lord of the Rings trilogy (or, more to the point, has sat through the extended versions on DVD) knows Peter Jackson has never been into brevity. He couldn't operate farther from a less-is-more aesthetic if he tried.
Eye-filling visuals, teary emotionalism, portentousness, sets and costumes that are just so, probing closeups, dialogue scenes that go on longer and are more exacting than necessary...Jackson loves to heap on the syrup.
It should therefore come as no surprise that King Kong, his latest film which Universal will open theatrically on...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 11:24 AM on Thursday, October 27, 2005
Get ready for "Elsewhere Live," a twice-weekly live-internet-radio talk show with telephone call-ins and all kinds of blah-dee-blah from yours truly. It'll start on Sunday, 11.20, and run also on Thursday evening (let's say at 10 pm EST, 7 pm Pacific). We're not talking about some Podcast bullshit (although the radio broadcasts will be archived and downloadable). We're talking about something new here...real throbbing internet radio that you can listen to "live" and call in to, just like any regular-ass radio talk show. And I won't have screeners!
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 9:02 PM on Wednesday, October 26, 2005
My God, this is it...it's here...Albert Brooks' Looking for Comedy in the Muslim Word, which will hit theatres in January...oh my God, I can't stand it...all that lovely brown skin, all those thick accents, those awful Ali Baba shoes, that lovely Iranian/Pakistani/what- ever olive-skinned woman whom Brooks hires, etc.
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 8:55 PM on Wednesday, October 26, 2005
I know you're not supposed to ask this and I'm sorry for the sudden loss of producer and Blake Edwards colleague Tony Adams, whom I interviewed in '81 or thereabouts about one of the Edwards' films...10 or S.O.B., I forget which...but who dies of a stroke at 52? What happened to the poor guy? How come obits never fill in the blanks?
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 10:26 AM on Wednesday, October 26, 2005
Speaking of the recently and sadly deceased, filmmaker Jacob Rosenberg has forwarded a link to a short film he made called Bleach that co-starred Charles Rocket, who killed himself in Connecticut earlier this month. A very good guy who ran into a bad patch.
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 10:12 AM on Wednesday, October 26, 2005
In the mid '50s, before CinemaScope lenses were perfected, everything and everyone looked horizontally distorted. The joke was that actors had the "CinemaScope mumps." But on widescreen TVs today -- in bars, people's living rooms, electronic media showrooms -- the distortion is easily double what the CinemaScope mumps syndrome delivered, and nobody blinks an eye. Across- the-board high-def widescreen TV is being promised by Direct TV and Comcast, etc., but the vast majority of broadcast images are still standard-sized (aspect ratio of 4 x 3, meant to fit your mom and pop's TV)...and yet!...the idiots who own widescreen TVs are showing everything at...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 8:40 AM on Wednesday, October 26, 2005
Claire Simpson's editing of The Constant Gardener is a kind of rhapsodic visual dance, and obviously fully deserving of an Oscar nom. It's hard to define the difference between oppressively heebie-jeebie, ants-in-your-pants film editing..the kind that makes you grit your teeth and makes you feel like you're swatting invisible flies (like the cutting of the action sequences in Paul Greengraass's The Bourne Supremacy), and what Simpson and director Fernando Meirelles achieve in Gardener. But one sings and the other doesn't, and, according to this piece by the Hollywood Reporter's Sheigh Crabtree, admiration for Simpson's editing has been voiced repeatedly by her...
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 6:35 AM on Wednesday, October 26, 2005
Responses to The Producers (Universal, 12.15) from a couple of readers who've gotten in touch have been underwhelming, but reaction among regular folks at research screenings, I'm told, has been fairly ecstatic. The guys who didn't like it told me the same thing...people were clapping at the end of each song and having a blast. It's okay to have a good time with broad, brassy obvious entertainments. I guess the only ones who are likely to have problems with this film are...let's fill in the blank later.
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 1:51 PM on Tuesday, October 25, 2005
The IFP is getting an early start on things by announcing its nominations for the 15th Annual Gotham Awards, which will be handed out on 11.30 in New York City. It's a nice inclusionary gesture to nominate Lodge Kerrigan's Keane and Miranda July's You and Me and Everyone We Know as competitors with Brokeback Mountain, Capote and A History of Violence for Best Feature. Ditto Michael Almereyda's William Eggleston in the Real World against Ballet Russes, Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, Werner Herzog's Grizzly Man and Henry-Alex Rubin and Dana Adam Shapiro's Murderball.
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 11:23 AM on Tuesday, October 25, 2005
My favorite flip-through book last summer was David Kamp and Steven Daly's "The Rock Snob's Dictionary" (Broadway Books), an incisive and tidy sum-up guide about the who, what and wherefores of elitist rock-music savoring.
And now I'm into "The Film Snob's Dictionary," which I scored an advance copy of last week. It's less of an education than "Rock Snobs" -- I'm obviously much more familiar with the turf -- but I'm having just as good a time with the knowingness and wit and concise prose style.
Just to be clear, I don't hate March of the Penguins. It's a fairly soulful and well-made film. What I don't like...what I couldn't stand as I saw the French-language version..was the tediousness of all that trekking across the frozen wastelands, and all the sitting around. If I were a penguin I would end it all. I would jump into the water in hopes of being eaten by a killer whale. George Clooney knows what I'm talking about.
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 10:32 AM on Monday, October 24, 2005
Variety's Justin Chang is calling Gore Verbinksi's The Weather Man (Paramount, 10.28) "one of the biggest downers to emerge from a major studio in recent memory...an overbearingly glum look at a Chicago celebrity combing through the emotional wreckage of his life." This view has been understood by Paramount for some time, and is one reason why they put off opening it earlier this year. (The theory apparently being that gloomy films play better in the fall.) "Aiming for an Alexander Payne-style synthesis of wry comedy and unflinching character study," Chang continues, "pic has been made with the utmost sincerity, but the...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 10:02 AM on Monday, October 24, 2005
Funny The Legend of Zorroreview by Variety's Brian Lowry...but how is it that I knew this period actioner would be "bigger, louder and considerably less charming than its predecessor" before reading Lowry or anyone else? I must be gifted with a sixth sense. The Martin Campbell-directed sequel (Columbia, 10.28) "gets by mostly on dazzling stunt work and the pleasure of seeing its dashing and glamorous leads back in cape and gown," says Lowry. "But the firm hand [Campbell] exhibited on the first go-round is shakier here, as the opening hour flits all over and hits some curiously flat patches. Only...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 9:49 AM on Monday, October 24, 2005
What a bummer year for George Clooney...seriously. I was thinking about this from time to time last weekend. Head pain, thoughts of suicide, short-term memory loss, and then his dog was killed by a rattlesnake...Jesus. It started with Clooney filming a scene in Syriana (Warner Bros., 11.23) in which he "was taped to a chair and getting beaten up and we did quite a few takes. The chair was kicked over and I hit my head. I tore my dura, which is the wrap around my spine which holds in spinal fluid. But it's not my back, it's my brain. I...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 8:31 AM on Monday, October 24, 2005
Performances that stay with you. Cinematography (by Roger Deakins) to die for. Waiting for Godot in the sand. All geared up and cranked up and no one to shoot. The hip journos -- the ones I've spoken to who are sharp and fair-minded enough to get the unique character of it, not to mention the sublime quality of presentation -- are liking and admiring Sam Mendes' Jarhead (Universal, 11.4).
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 7:59 AM on Monday, October 24, 2005
I've somehow missed what Jack Malvern of the London Times Online is reporting in advance of the London Film Festival debut of March of the Penguins, which is that U.S. conservative commentators have embraced the Warner Independent release as a monogamy and right-to-life metaphor. Rightie film critic Michael Medved says it ’Äúmost passionately affirms traditional norms like monogamy, sacrifice and child rearing." Uhm, okay. Sacrifice and child-rearing, fine...but forget monogamy. Penguins creator Luc Jacquet says that penguins are far less monogamous than people. "If you want an example of monogamy, penguins are not a good choice," Jacquet told Malvern. "The divorce...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 7:07 AM on Monday, October 24, 2005
The most exciting (charming, pleasing, smile-inducing) thing I saw all weekend was recorded on a webcam in China last July. I'm serious. For all I know I'm the last guy in the States to see this, but this is the best non-pro music video I've seen in ages. These guys are geniuses.
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 6:50 AM on Monday, October 24, 2005
Apologies for ducking out of sight since late Friday. I don't believe in days off. Mentally, that is. But some inexorable force demanded a two-and-a-half-day shutdown & that was that.
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 6:29 AM on Monday, October 24, 2005
You can bid a sad Oscar farewell to Sean Penn, Willie Stark, Patty Clarkson, Mike Medavoy and director-writer Steven Zallian...at least as far as the '05 race is concerned.
All The King's Men, a southern political melodrama about the corruption of a home-grown politician in the mode of Louisiana Senator Huey P. Long, has been pulled from its 12.16 release date, which has been scheduled for several months now.
Sean Penn in Steven Zallian's All The King's Men
ATKM will probably open in late '06, according to Medavoy, the film's producer and head of the...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 6:39 PM on Thursday, October 20, 2005
You can bid a sad Oscar farewell to Sean Penn, Willie Stark, Patty Clarkson, Mike Medavoy and director-writer Steven Zallian...at least as far as the '05 race is concerned.
All The King's Men, a southern political melodrama about a the corruption of a home-grown politician in the mode of Louisiana Senator Huey P. Long, has been pulled from its 12.16 release date, which has been scheduled for several months now.
Sean Penn in Steven Zallian's All The King's Men
ATKM will probably now open in late '06, according to Medavoy, the film's producer and head...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 6:37 PM on Thursday, October 20, 2005
Quality over quantity...right? Longer usually ain't better and less is usually more. Except when it comes to performances.
The only exception I can think of was Beatrice Straight taking a Best Supporting Actress Oscar for a single deeply-felt scene in Sidney Lumet's Network. But if Straight had given that killer performance in an anthology film, she'd have been passed over.
Jason Isaacs, Robin Wright Penn in Rodrigo Garcia's Nine Lives
The rule seems to be that a performance isn't award-worthy unless it takes the viewer on at least a 70 or 80-minute journey.
It takes about a half-hour to accept Steve Martin as the idiotic Inspector Clouseau in Shawn Levy's (hah!...Shawn Levy with a possessive credit!) The Pink Panther (Columbia, 2.10.06). But after you're past this it's pretty funny. Sony/Columbia won't sell it right (what do they care?...it's an MGM/UA leftover) and it probably won't make any decent coin in the States, etc. (Europe, maybe.) But how come the IMDB doesn't list Clive Owen's cameo walk-on? He plays agent 006...half-goof, half-real...a kind of half-smoke signal sent to the Bond movie producers back when Panther was being shot (which was what...a year and a half ago?) to...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 11:42 PM on Tuesday, October 18, 2005
It's official: the Hollywood Film Festival has labelled itself as the shallowest and whoriest film festival on the face of the planet. The festival's "Board of Advisors" managed this in one fell swoop by announcing that George Lucas's Star Wars: Episode III -- Revenge of the Sith is the winner of this year's "Hollywood Movie of the Year" award. Lucas, an over-praised hog-at-the-trough if there ever was one, will be given the award at the Hollywood Awards Gala Ceremony at the Beverly Hilton Hotel on 10.24. The Lucas announcement was made by Carlos de Abreu, the festival's founder, exec director and reigning oral-love-bequeather....Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 9:51 PM on Tuesday, October 18, 2005
I think it's vaguely whorish that Ridley Scott wants to direct an "Encyclopedia Brown, Boy Detective" movie. Scott and Howard Deutsch, who owns the rights to the series of novels written by Donald J. Sobol (despite Sobol's claim in Sharon Waxman's N.Y. Times piece that the rights will eventually revert to him and anyone who cuts a deal with Deutsch "will be stuck"), are trying to launch another Potter-like tentpole series...and all I see are a couple of guys trying to cash in. I would feel differently if my kids were eight or ten years old, but they're not and so...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 10:11 AM on Tuesday, October 18, 2005
Thanks to the Washington Post's Ann Hornaday for the really nice plug in Sunday's (10.16) edition: "[Hollywood Elsewhere] is the blog of Jeffrey Wells, a Los Angeles-based film writer and critic who offers pithy, insightful observations about the industry as well as smart reviews of movies he's just seen at advance screen- ings and festivals. A nifty compendium of gossip, reflection and old-fashioned shoe-leather reporting, this is the first thing I go to in the morning. A must-visit for cineastes as well as garden- variety fans, Hollywood Elsewhere manages to be lively without being snarky and enthusiastic without being overweening. A...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 12:35 PM on Monday, October 17, 2005
The only film opening this Friday (10.21) that's tracking to any degree is Andrzej Bartkowiak's Doom (Universal)...which the elitists have almost no interest in seeing. The only 10.28 openers with decent numbers are Saw 2 and The Legend of Zorro. The likable and smoothly made Dreamer: Inspired by a True Story (10/21) snuck last weekend and isn't tracking...yet. Shopgirl and Stay, both out 10.21, aren't tracking either. And there's not much interest in Gore Verbinski's Weather Man with Nic Cage, Paradise Now or The Dying Gaul, which all open on 10.28.
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 11:46 AM on Monday, October 17, 2005
It's tough out there but Jesus God, the poor guy...Charles Rocket, the former SNL star, killed himself in Connecticut a little more a week ago. I knew him and worked with him a little bit in '87 when I wrote the press notes for a truly crappy Cannon film he starred in with Carrie Lowell called Down Twisted. The last film he made came out two years ago...RKO Pictures' Shade with Sylvester Stallone, Melanie Griffith and Gabriel Byrne. In 2000 he costarred in the TV series Normal, Ohio, which starred John Goodman as a gay guy living in oddball-holmey Ohio. Rocket...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 11:07 AM on Monday, October 17, 2005
Explaining to Time's Richard Schickel that sometimes "you have to trust your gut" and go with "a premonition that you can get something decent out of it," Clint Eastwood is doing something fairly startling. Come February he'll begin shooting Lamps Before the Wind, a kind of cultural reverse-angle, Japanese-soldier companion piece to his World War II war battle-of-Iwo-Jima drama Flags of Our Fathers (DreamWorks, due in Nov./Dec. '06) that focuses on the Marines who raised the U.S. flag on top of Mt. Surabachi. Schickel's excellent piece ("Clint's Double Take") reports that Flags screenwriter Paul Haggis begged off...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 10:59 AM on Monday, October 17, 2005
Doug Pratt of DVDlaser.com says we should all check out a five-minute video piece by director Sydney Pollack on the new DVD of The Interpreter that explains the importance of letterboxing. "His plea for getting braindead viewers to understand why letterboxing is better is exceptionally well composed and engaging -- essentially the best piece ever done on the topic in a DVD supplement," writes Pratt. "Pollack talks about how he made films in a scope format initially, and then switched to the boxier, TV-friendly format when he saw what happened to his wide films on TV. He then explains...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 10:47 AM on Monday, October 17, 2005
Director Peter Jackson has, in a very friendly, brother-to- brother way, whacked composer Howard Shore over creative differences on the King Kong score and brought in James Newton Howard as a replacement. Last-minute score replacements are usually a sign of trouble (it happened on Gangs of New York) but let's not jump to conclusions. If I were Jackson I would make sure of one thing: the ceremonial drums emanating from the native ceremony on Skull Island (as heard from Carl Denham's ship anchored a few hundred feet off the coast) would sound just like Max Steiner's... they would sound crude and spooky and...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 6:39 PM on Sunday, October 16, 2005
I haven't confirmed this directly with Warner Bros., but a fairly well-planted exhibitor source tells me the running time of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (Warner Bros., 11.18) has been "confirmed" at 157 minutes.
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 5:04 PM on Sunday, October 16, 2005
I've said it before: the snaggle tooth that Peter Jackson has given his big ape is, I suspect, a blade of grass that hints at what may be going on in the emotional universe of King Kong (Universal, 12.14). The snaggle-tooth is a way of Charlie Chaplin-izing Mr. Kong...of making him seem vulnerable and endearing. (But that's Jackson...an incorrigible emotional underliner.) Harry Knowles agrees -- he says "the wonky tooth [is] a bit lame" and gives Kong "a goofy look." I'm just saying that the comparison shots that Harry has run (with and without snaggle-tooth) probably don't mean anything. The...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 4:06 PM on Sunday, October 16, 2005
The shooting of Michael Mann's Miami Vice (Universal, 7.28.06), which stars Colin Farrell and Jamie Foxx, is generating talk among guys in the production-chat circuit. Before I pass this along, understand that similar yarns were spun during production of Mann's Collateral (i.e., shooting and shooting with no end, unhappy crew, budget overruns, etc.) and look how that one turned out...brilliant. Remember also what Uma Thurman said in Pulp Fiction about guys gossiping with each other, and that the stuff I'm getting now is second-hand. That said, the Vice chatter is that "Mann, Foxx and the budget are out of control," a friend confides....Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 2:10 PM on Sunday, October 16, 2005
Matthew Modine's upcoming coffee-table book about his experience making Full Metal Jacket with Stanley Kubrick ("Full Metal Jacket Diary," Rugged Land, 10.25) costs about $20 bucks on Amazon...which is a lot cheaper than Taschen's $200 dollar The Stanley Kubrick Archives . The Publisher's Weekly review says Modine's writing "isn't graceful" -- I've read another comment claiming Modine adopts the syntax and attitude of his Private Joker character from the film -- "but his insider's view of events have enough acrid flavor and authenticity to compensate. The book is filled with Modine's excellent photographs, which powerfully supplement the sometimes sketchy...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 1:17 PM on Sunday, October 16, 2005
DVD distributors re-issue classic titles so often, each time claiming that the film has been beautifully remastered and made to look much better than before...that after a while the pitches don't register. The marketing of Warner Home Video's brand-new The Wizard of Oz DVD packages (both a two-disc and three-disc set, out 10.25) on the WHV website promises the same-old "dazzlingly restored picture"...but this time (and I can feel the skepticism before even saying this) it really is exceptional and the best-looking-ever because of a process called "edge detection." The WHV marketers are figuring there's no point in trying to reach...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 12:09 PM on Sunday, October 16, 2005
For all my tussles with David Poland, attention and respect should be paid for his having declared on 5.27.04 that Rachel McAdams "may be the next huge female movie star"...just after he saw The Notebook. I was bored by The Notebook and didn't care for Mean Girls, so I didn't get on the McAdams bandwagon until Wedding Crashers and then Red Eye last summer. (And she's excellent again in The Family Stone.) We have to give the devil his due (and that's not an inference, just an expression)....Poland called it way before me, before anyone.
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 4:04 PM on Saturday, October 15, 2005
If I was 17 and into seeing a movie with my girlfriend and didn't care about anything except cheap thrills and maybe getting some action? I'd take her to The Fog, the weekend's #1 film with a projected $13 or $14 million haul. In Her Shoes is #4 and on track to make $6 million-plus, amounting to a 40% drop from last weekend. I spoke last night to a married movie buff in his 50s who'd just seen The Fog and thought it was shit. I asked if he'd seen In Her Shoes and he said no but he'd like to. (I could...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 3:42 PM on Saturday, October 15, 2005
Check out this 30 year-old trailer for Michelangelo Antonioni's The Passenger, which Sony Pictures Classics is re-releasing on 10.28. The stuffed-shirt narration sounds so stuffy and forced it's almost funny. The Passenger is an intriguing, sometimes fascinating film but honestly...? It's never been in my Antonioni pantheon. L'eclisse, L'aventura, Blow-up and Il Grido are much better films. It's a notch or two ahead of Zabriskie Point and Red Desert. I haven't seen it in ages, but part of the problem was casting Maria Schneider opposite Jack Nicholson. On the other hand, there's that awesome final tracking shot that starts in...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 3:14 PM on Saturday, October 15, 2005
Columbia's Amy Pascal's claim in Sharon Waxman's N.Y. Times piece (10.15) that Daniel Craig, the new 007, "is the same size as Sean Connery" is hooey. I'm not calling Craig a shrimp, but he's a good two inches shorter than me. I'm 6 foot 1/2 inch, and I'd say he's about 5 foot ten and a half inches, give or take...maybe 5' 11". (I stood next to him after we did a Layer Cake interview in Park City last Janaury during the Sundance Film Festival.) And I've stood next to Connery, and he's at least 6'1" or 6'2". The website Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 2:54 PM on Saturday, October 15, 2005
20th Century Fox is pushing back the release date of The Family Stone from early November to December 16th. It'll probably be explained that the home-for-the-holidays mood makes it a perfect Xmas release. But of course, Fox has known it's a Christmassy movie for many months. This is probably about wanting more time to sell it properly and get the definite-interest and first-choice numbers up.
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 9:43 AM on Friday, October 14, 2005
It's official: Daniel Craig is the new James Bond. The first blonde 007, and...the shortest. Sorry but I had to throw that in. I've stood shoulder-to-shoulder with Connery, Moore, Brosnan and Craig and I know whereof I speak. But this is easily maskable on-screen. Craig told journos at this morning's London press conference that the Casino Royale script (I presume he means the revised one by Paul Haggis) is "incredible" and "once I'd read that, I realized that I didn't have a choice. I had to go for it." I still say a film can only be as good as the...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 8:11 AM on Friday, October 14, 2005
Eight or nine movies with gay-themes and prominent gay characters will be playing between now and early December. But only three have serious weight, and only one is unequivocally front-and-center about two guys in love with each other -- Ang Lee's Brokeback Mountain (Focus Features, 12.9).
The other two -- Bennett Miller's Capote and Craig Lucas's The Dying Gaul (Strand, 11.4) -- are really about work and politics. Capote is about a man who's completely consumed by the writing of a book, and Gaul, which I saw and liked at Sundance '05, is about Hollywood-style power games.
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posted by Jeffrey Wells at 1:14 AM on Friday, October 14, 2005
Another diss for 20th Century Fox's marketing team: Ridley Scott has criticized them for selling last May's Kingdom Of Heaven as a romantic actioner instead of a religious and political piece, which he argued for but didn't get. Fox marketers were seemingly afraid of playing up the Islamic-vs.-Christian conflict element in the film's advertising because this would reflect on the U.S. presence in Iraq and other political issues of the day. Okay, but the running-time issue is a bit more interesting. I read two or three posts last spring claiming that Scott's three-hour Kingdom cut, which was test-screened before being trimmed, was a...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 2:06 PM on Thursday, October 13, 2005
Sony Pictures Entertainment and Eon Productions will officially announce that Dan...sorry, will announce the name of whomever's been chosen to play James Bond in Martin Campbell's Casino Royale at a London press conference tomorrow (Friday, 10.14). If only Wilson and Broccoli had gone with Quentin Tarantino's idea for Casino Royale..."let me do it my way, I won't screw up your franchise," etc...but they're going with Campbell and Crash screenwriter Paul Haggis, who's said to be interested in remaking the Bond series the way Chris Nolan revitalized Batman and Bruce Wayne. This can't really happen, of course, with producers Michael Wilson and Barbara Broccoli...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 1:09 PM on Thursday, October 13, 2005
Harold Pinter was named today in Stockholm as this year's winner of the Nobel Prize in literature. The Birthday Party, The Servant, Accident...the screenplays for Turtle Diary, The French Lieutenant's Woman...of course. But for me the ultimate Pinter work has always been Betrayal, which I first saw on the New York stage in 1980 with Roy Scheider, Raul Julia and Blythe Danner. Maybe the rights holder to David Jones' riveting 1983 film version (CBS Fox Home Video put out a cruddy, muddy-looking VHS in the mid '80s) will take notice and finally release a cleanly mastered DVD...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 12:03 PM on Thursday, October 13, 2005
The first press screenings of Sam Mendes' Jarhead that I've heard about will begin late next week. The sound of those slowed-down synthesized helicopter blades on the website is an obvious salute to Apocalypse Now, but the script suggests it'll be something more Full Metal Jacket-ish than Platoon-like.
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 5:18 PM on Wednesday, October 12, 2005
Director Tony Scott (Domino) on his forthcoming remake of Walter Hill's The Warriors ('79), which will start shooting sometime in '06: "I see it as Kingdom Of Heaven meets The Warriors because with these gangs...instead of having twenty or thirty guys, I'm going to have three thousand, five thousand guys in the L.A. river beds and it's going to look like L.A. during the riots. I love the original movie...that's why I'm in doing this, but I'm not going to copy the original". Hill's film, based on the ancient Greek nonfiction tale "Anabasis," was about a New York gang trying to make it...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 5:07 PM on Wednesday, October 12, 2005
Leonardo DiCaprio obviously has this liking for dark heavyweight melodramas (The Blood Diamond, The Departed, The Chancellor Manuscripts, Gangs of New York) or biopics about famous ballsy guys (The Aviator, Catch Me If You Can and a film in development about Timothy Leary). Is anyone else thinking he needs to make something light...a clever comedy, maybe a mushy romance of some kind?
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 4:48 PM on Wednesday, October 12, 2005
There's an "airline geek" named Andy Smith who points out that (a) there's a dusky twilight shot of the mythical 747 that Orlando Bloom's character takes from Portland to Louisville in the trailer for Elizabethtown, and says (b) that this aircraft "is none other than Columbia Airlines flight 409 (obviously not a real airline) from the movie Airport '75. You know...the one with crossed-eyed stewardess Karen Black trying to fly a plane with a large hole ripped into it from an air-to-air collision?" This has to be checked out. Bloom and Dunst flirting all alone in first-class, and Karen Black in...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 4:24 PM on Wednesday, October 12, 2005
The Family Stone (20th Century Fox, 11.4) looks like a hit because it has some- thing for lightweight Sex and the City fans (you know...the ones who say they've enjoyed this or that film because it's "fun") as well as those looking for a quality deal with a little heart and gravitas.
I've mentioned that hit HBO series because Sarah Jessica Parker is the nominal star of The Family Stone, although it's primarily an ensemble dramedy with great performances all around, plus top-grade writing and directing from the unknown but obviously talented Thomas Bezucha.
Two changes with 20th Century Fox's The Family Stone. One, they've decided to do a platform-release on 11.4 (i.e., the original opening date) in 800-plus theatres, and then go wide on 11.11. (The theatre tallies were wrong before...sorry.) Two, they're cooking up a new one-sheet that will presumably try to sell what it actually is (a sharply-written family comedy with heart) as opposed to whatever that upraised wedding finger one-sheet conveys. Which is what exactly? Marriage sucks?...my husband sucks?...I've changed my mind? It's catchy (I showed it a woman friend who's out of the loop and she went, "Aha!") but it...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 3:50 PM on Tuesday, October 11, 2005
I said before going to the Toronto Film Festival than I hoped Niki Caro's North Country (Warner Bros., 10.14) wouldn't just be another dramatization of a sexual-harassment issue, which seemed old-hat to me. And I'm afraid N.Y. Times writer Caryn James is also on the money when she says the following: "While it seems to be a film with a cause, [North Country] refights a battle that took place long ago. As one of the few women working in a mine, Charlize Theron faces insults and discrimination in a role that seems conceived with an Oscar campaign in mind. Women still...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 12:21 PM on Tuesday, October 11, 2005
It occured to me last weekend in the course of the Family Stone junket in Pasadena that right now, a healthy portion of the publicity team at 20th Century Fox is (a) female, (b) married and (c) with child and on the verge of going on maternity leave, or with recently arrrived kids at home. When Fox marketing exec Jeff Godsick was told a couple of weeks of still another impending birth and a request for maternity leave, he allegedly replied, "Hmmm...maybe I'm pregnant?"
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 11:08 AM on Tuesday, October 11, 2005
Nobody cares about the James Bond casting process. I might have mentioned this once or twice before, but the franchise is a kind of cultural tumor...about a character and a mindset that has nothing to do with anything in our world today except for the bizarre fact that when a Bond movie opens several million people pay to see it (which I attribute to mindless habit)...about a character who mattered in the world of the early '50s to early '60s, and then degenerated into a fey figurehead of a series of special effects-and-gadgets movies during the '70s and '80s, and whose legend over...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 10:14 AM on Tuesday, October 11, 2005
"I've always viewed life as material for a movie," The Squid and the Whale director Noah Baumbach says to N.Y. Times profiler Deborah Solomon, and thereby flashing his hard-core obsessive filmmaker credentials. "I am sure there will be a backlash against The Squid and the Whale," he also says, "but I am hoping it doesn't kick in for at least three months. I do like having books on my shelves. I do value that life. I love Bob Dylan. And I love Philip Roth. I am reading 'The Professor of Desire' now, which is about the great Philip Roth struggle between...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 4:53 PM on Sunday, October 9, 2005
That two-year Touchstone production deal that has been handed to Rod Lurie and his Battle Plan Productions in the wake of Disney-owned ABC bouncing him off the new ABC hit series Commander in Chief, which Lurie created, in order to make way for the new creative honcho Steven Bochco....well, I'm told it's pretty rich. Like $4 million rich. It's face-saving tribute money. Lurie created the show, wrote it, ran the whole ship...and then (a) "creative differences" arose or (b) Lurie was overworked or (c) Disney/ABC felt the show could be better sculpted...whatever. They got Lurie to be cool and gracious about...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 4:31 PM on Sunday, October 9, 2005
Doctor: [Your wife is] not so sick, my lord, as she is troubled with thick-coming fancies that keep her from her rest.
Husband: Cure her of that! Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased? Pluck from the memory of a rooted sorrow, raze out the written troubles of the brain and, with some sweet oblivious antidote, cleanse the stuffed bosom of the perilous stuff which weighs upon the heart?
Doctor: Therein the patient must minister to himself.
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 4:10 PM on Sunday, October 9, 2005
There's one curious statistic in Sharon Waxman's N.Y. Times story about a new online study finding that Hollywood is "being jilted" by young males who are being lured away by video games and other digital activities. The readings said that guys-under-25 saw "24 percent fewer movies this summer than they did in the summer of 2003, when the same study was conducted. The drop in moviegoing was much smaller for women and for other age groups." The study contacted 2000 people and used "a random, nationally representative sample of moviegoers who were queried online in August." The odd bit comes at...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 8:25 AM on Sunday, October 9, 2005
There's no rejoicing in Mudville over the weekend's box-office tallies, and particularly Wallace & Gromit's $4.2 million on Friday, which indicates a $13 or $14 million weekend...along those lines. Industry spitballers looked at the tracking and figured it would do a lot better...in the vicinity of at least $20 million, if not higher. And something is certainly wrong with the world when Flightplan, a movie that loses its grip in the final act and is now in its third week (having opened 9.23), nudges out In Her Shoes, $3.1 million to $3 million per Friday's reported estimates. It looks like Shoes is heading...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 8:00 AM on Sunday, October 9, 2005
I've been holding off saying anything about Thursday's firing of Par Classics co-prezzies Ruth Vitale and David Dinerstein by Paramount Pictures chief Brad Grey, and here it is Saturday and I still can't think of anything very penetrating...sorry. And I am sorry about this. Ruth and David are good hombres. It's totally routine, yes, for new studio heads to clear the decks and discharge in-place execs so they can bring in "their own people," blah, blah. Grey's brand-new Par Classics chief will be Lion's Gate's Tom Ortenberg, apparently. I have nothing to add to the irony of Ruth and David getting pushed out...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 3:13 PM on Saturday, October 8, 2005
Go the Capote site and click through to the review section (which has a blurb from yours truly), and while you're doing that listen to the excerpts from the score by Mychael Danna, brother of Jeff Danna, who also composes for films. The last score by Mycahel that I really liked was for Shattered Glass, but the one for Capote is even better. Listen to it for five minutes or so and it starts sinking in deep. Now I want to buy the CD.
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 5:40 PM on Friday, October 7, 2005
Sometimes people have trouble with simple declarative sentences and laying things bare. If I'd done some calling around on this thing, I would have uncovered the thing of it. In the meantime, we have Rush and Molloy reporting this morning that Warner Independent is dumping Paul Dinello and Stephen Colbert's Strangers with Candy, a feature prequel to the widely-praised TV series featuring Jerri Blank (Amy Sedaris), a 46 year-old ex-junkie and ex-con who returns to high school in a bid to start her life over. But George and Joanna didn't say (or even speculate all that energetically) why. Rush-Molloy wrote that...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 4:55 PM on Friday, October 7, 2005
Wes Anderson has been living in Paris for the past several months, "just off the Champs Elysee" and somewhere in the vicinity of Roman Polanki's place on Avenue Montaigne, according to Squid and the Whale director-writer Noah Baumbach. Baumbach visited Anderson there last winter-spring to work on their script for Anderson's next film, The Fantastic Mr. Fox, an animated film based on the Roald Dahl book of the same name. (Pissed-off farmers wage war upon a sly fox and his family because he's been eating their chickens.) Henry Selick, The guy who did the animated fish in The Life Aquatic, will do the...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 4:29 PM on Friday, October 7, 2005
"The joy of this unassuming, generous film is that it never sells out its characters' desires or ours," N.Y. Times critic Manohla Dragis says of In Her Shoes. Of the two leads, "Toni Collette is so very good and goes so very deep inside her character -- bringing us right alongside her -- that she becomes the de facto center of the film as well as the beneficiary of our greatest emotional investment. You want Rose to lay down that ice cream container and poor-pitiful-me expression, to shuck her social conditioning and family dysfunction so she too can sashay in dangerous...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 4:13 PM on Friday, October 7, 2005
The baby that Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes are said to be expecting (according to a 10.5 piece in People magazine) is "fake...a Miracle Baby," according to the suspicions of Defamer's Mark Lisanti. Mine too (kinda), but how do you fake a baby? The rumble is that Cruise isn't the dad, etc., but if someone knows or has heard something factual (as opposed to the usual blather), please share.
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 11:43 AM on Thursday, October 6, 2005
This is a banner fall-winter season for Fox...In Her Shoes, The Family Stone, Walk the Line...three bulls-eyes. Well crafted, commercial, award-calibre, critic-friendly. Something tells me The Family Stone might be the big breadwinner, but who knows? And to a publicist I spoke to yesterday...no, I don't care if other critics aren't as supportive of In Her Shoes as I've been. In my heart I know I'm right. A friend who saw it at last Saturday's sneak in Manhattan Beach says the audience clapped at the end, so...okay?
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 11:00 AM on Thursday, October 6, 2005
Who the hell is Thomas Bezucha? Until this evening I didn't have a clue, but he's the former fashion executive (ten years as creative services vp for Polo/Ralph Lauren) who's come out of dead friggin' nowhere to write and direct one of the best-written, most emotionally on-target and true-to-life family Christmas movies (okay, with a tidy commercial attitude...fine) ever made. It's called The Family Stone (20th Century Fox, 11.11) and there's no question it's a hit. Don't count on a rave from Armond White, but I'm telling you it's going to go over big with educated blue-state Average Joes,...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 9:59 PM on Wednesday, October 5, 2005
I have to side with David Poland's "stop, George, stop" plea about George Clooney's plans to remake Sidney Lumet and Paddy Chayefsky's Network for television. It was a cutting and wonderfully nervy film in '76 because it was forecasting trends -- reality TV, infotainment, cult-of-the-personality news anchors -- that were starting to take shape but hadn't quite happened. And of course, the fact that Network turned out to be prophetic has added to its reputation. But Clooney himself nailed the problem of a remake when he told the Associated Press that he was "briefly mystified when he screened it...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 5:45 PM on Wednesday, October 5, 2005
Two for the Money (Universal, 10.7) is about this hunky ex-college football player (Matthew McConaughey) with some kind of supernatural psychic ability to pick the winners of football games. Or who knows teams and their quirks and tendencies so well it seems like he's got a crystal-ball thing going on. And he gets hired to work for a kind of high-end betting consultancy firm, run by this larger-than-life blowhard named Walter Abrams (Al Pacino), that sells information about which teams to bet on and...I can't do this. I don't mind gambling as long as it's not my money on the table,...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 2:32 PM on Wednesday, October 5, 2005
I'm trying to imagine what I might find inviting about Mike Newell's Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (Warner Bros., 11.18). Last year I suggested killing Rupert Grint's Ron Weasley character because he never does anything except whine and wimper, but you know that'll never happen. If they would only free Harry and Hermione (Emma Watson) from Hogwarts and set them loose upon the world. Send them on the road...send them up against real-world villains and adult situations. But no...we're going to be stuck at Hogwarts again with the same old gang, and I can't understand why everyone is so...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 11:37 AM on Wednesday, October 5, 2005
There's an atmospheric gloominess in Joseph Castelo's just-opened The War Within (Magnolia/HD Net). Almost all the scenes are darkly lit, and the lead character of Hassan (Ayad Akhtar), a Pakistani student who comes to New York to carry out a terrorist bombing, wears a glum, vaguely irritated, don't-be-trivial-with me expression the whole time.
Knowing as little I do about Islamic martyr types, gloominess seems appropriate. These guys are furious about American aggression in the Middle East and they don't really see life as something to be lived and savored with any joy. To them it's all about the payoff in the...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 4:52 PM on Tuesday, October 4, 2005
The decision by Nicolas Cage and wife Alice Kim Cage to name their just-born son Kal-el is...how can I best put this?...deranged. Can you imagine growing up knowing you've been named after Superman (i.e., his Kryptonian name)? This ranks with Frank Zappa naming his daughter Moon Unit and that dirty mangy dog in the Johnny Cash song naming his son "Sue."
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 10:44 PM on Monday, October 3, 2005
I've seen a demo of Sony's Blu-ray high-definition DVD process, and I've asked two or three people about the differences between it and Toshiba's HD-DVD system, and it comes down to this -- Blu-ray is a more expensive process but it's more high-end...more digitally au courant and forward-looking...and HD-DVD, which I haven't seen, is more of a backward-designed system but it's cheaper to work with. There are one or two other twists and wrinkles, but that's what it basically comes down to, trust me. And you won't find any trade reports anywhere that just say that. The latest development in the...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 11:31 PM on Sunday, October 2, 2005
There's a DVD series called "Sundance Festival Favorites," and the distributor is the curiously-named Genius Products, Inc. Curious because one of the titles, which is due for release on 10.25, is Jill Spreicher's Clockwatchers('98), a comedy about office angst and girl empowerment that costarred Toni Collette, Parker Posey and Lisa Kudrow. Curious because Clockwatchers wasn't even a slight favorite at the 1997 Sundance Film Festival...it died there. The word was so negative that it took another year and a half for the film to find its way into theatres. It opened on 5.15.98.
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 10:33 PM on Sunday, October 2, 2005
A lot of journos (including columnist Emanuel Levy) have written pieces about the just-passed 50th anniversary of James Dean's death, which happened around sundown on 9.30.55. But how many have driven up to the actual collision spot in Cholame, California, and...you know, gotten out of the car and stood there and closed their eyes and smelled the air and let the lingering vibe of that tragedy (and believe me, you can still feel it) sink in? I'm just asking.
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 10:10 PM on Sunday, October 2, 2005
I slipped into a 9:45 pm showing of Capote Saturday night (10.1) at the Arclight and there were only two or three unoccupied seats. Bennett Miller's film averaged a bit more than $25,000 per screen with a haul of $303,000 in just twelve situations. A good start, but a film like this needs to pace itself. Then again, how can any semi-intelligent movie fan go through the next four or five months without seeing Phillip Seymour Hoffman's knock-down Oscar-calibre lead performance? There's no ducking it.
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 3:29 PM on Sunday, October 2, 2005
Here's a nicely written Roman Polanski interview piece by the Guardian's Sue Summers. I'm now into catching Oliver Twist, which I didn't feel like making an effort to see during the Toronto Film Festival. Polanski doesn't like to sit down with journalists. I tried to speak with him in Paris in '02 when the Oscar chances of The Pianist were looking uncertain, but he woudn't do it. Something tells me if Summers had been a fat balding male, the sit-down might not have happened. And it's a tiny bit curious that Summers pretty much blows the privacy thing with this graph:...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 3:02 PM on Sunday, October 2, 2005
Nobody at Warner Bros. told me about any screenings of Carroll Ballard's Duma, which has been called an excellent & moving kids-and-nature movie by Scott Foundas and Roger Ebert, and it's now hitting me I have to pay to see it at a theatre this weekend ....great. If I don't go it'll probably be yanked and then I'll have to wait four months for the DVD.
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 1:52 PM on Saturday, October 1, 2005
Reactions to Susan Stroman's The Producers appear to be sharply divided at the very least, and that's not just another way of saying the reactions are "mixed." The movie has a lot of fans. A guy who attended last Thursday's research screening wrote that "even though my entire group (myself plus three friends, all of whom see a fair number of flicks) despised The Producers, there were those in the audience who were clearly having a good time. They were clapping after every song. But for me, all the zip and brains of Mel Brooks' original 1968 movie have been sucked out in...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 11:42 AM on Saturday, October 1, 2005
Hmmm....a moderately interesting piece by the N.Y. Times' Sharon Waxman about a recent visit to the set of Paul Weitz's American Dreamz, a $19 million political satire that will stick it to Team Bush. My first thought was that the film could date very quickly, depending on what happens in the news...but maybe not. Dennis Quaid is playing a "clueless, if good-hearted head of state named Staton...Marcia Gay Harden plays his Laura-like wife who calls him 'Poopie'...Willem Dafoe, a senior presidential adviser of the Karl Rove kind, gives the president 'happy pills' and fits him with an earpiece...Hugh Grant stars as...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 10:16 AM on Saturday, October 1, 2005
The L.A. Times' Claudia Eller and John Horn are now saying that studio execs are admitting that last summer's slump was mostly about cruddy movies, and probably wasn't a harbinger of a permanent downturn in theatrical revenues. The reason for this sudden candor is that Hollywood has just experienced four punchy weeks at the box-office (grosses 17% higher than what they were last year from Labor Day to last weekend) due to the popularity of The Exorcism of Emily Rose, Transporter 2, Flightplan and Tim Burton's Corpse Bride. To which I say again -- it's the admissions, stupid. The number of...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 9:53 AM on Saturday, October 1, 2005
