Upcoming
June 11
June 12
Call of the Wild 3D
Youssou N'Dour: I Bring What I Love
June 16
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Dead Snow
Whatever Works
June 24
Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen
June 26
Cheri
Fireflies in the Garden
July 1
Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs
July 3
The Girl from Monaco
I Hate Valentine's Day
July 10
July 15
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
July 17
July 24
All Good Things
The Answer Man
In the Loop
July 29
July 31
The Cove
August 7
When in Rome
August 14
A Perfect Getaway
District 9
The Goods: The Don Ready Story
Ponyo
Pool Boys
Spread
The Time Traveler's Wife
August 21
Five Minutes of Heaven
Goose on the Loose!
It Might Get Loud
World's Greatest Dad
August 28
The Boat that Rocked
September 4
Amreeka
Carriers
Citizen Game
Shanghai
September 9
September 11
The Red Canvas
Tyler Perrys: I Can Do It All Myself
September 17
The Burning Plain
September 18
Brand New Day
Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs
Jennifer's Body
Splice
September 25
October 2
A Serious Man
Toy Story/Toy Story 2
Tuesday, February 28, 2006
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A friend sent me a
A friend sent me a list of scripts, and I'm wondering which (if any) seem the most intriguing to readers. (1) Casino Royale by Neal Purvis & Robert Wade, second set of revisions by Paul Haggis (12.13.05); (2) Believe it or Not! by Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski (5/6/05); (3) The Last Kiss by Paul Haggis (10.31.03); (4) Night At The Museum by Scott Frank (2.4.5); (5) The Martian Child by Seth E. Bass & Jonathan Tolins (3.14.05); (6) The Astronaut Farmer by Mark & Michael Polish (6.16.05); (7) Steven Soderbergh and Terrence Malick's Che; (8) Cabin Fever 2 by Adam Green (9.20.04);...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 6:17 PM on Tuesday, February 28, 2006
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Sir Carol Reed made three
Sir Carol Reed made three masterpieces in a row in the mid to late '40s -- The Fallen Idol, Odd Man Out and The Third Man And what does he win his Oscar for? Oliver (1968), a mediocre big-studio musical that seems a little less each time you reflect upon it. (Forwarded by reader Jeremy Fassler.)
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 5:34 PM on Tuesday, February 28, 2006
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"I was fortunate enough to
"I was fortunate enough to meet Paddy Chayefsky at the Carnegie Deli very near the end of his life. I asked him if he had any idea, when he wrote Network, how life would follow art. He said that his original script had been twice as cynical but he had been forced to dilute it to get it made. When he asked why I was so interested, I told him I worked in TV news. 'Oh wait', he said, 'just wait.'" -- Christopher Dalrymple, Digital Verite.
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 5:17 PM on Tuesday, February 28, 2006
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The deadline for the Oscar
The deadline for the Oscar ballots to be filled out and received happened exactly fourteen minutes ago -- 5 p.m. Pacific on Tuesday, 2.28. Please, please...give us a surprise in one of the major categories.
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 5:11 PM on Tuesday, February 28, 2006
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I suggested a continuation of
I suggested a continuation of David Carr's "Carptebagger"/Red Carpet column a few days ago, and now it looks like Carr is giving the idea some thought. "Although his 'Carpetbagger' movie awards season blog is supposed to go dark after the Oscars, Carr said that he might consider continuing to blog for the Times as an add-on to his regular media column. He told us that blogging has taught him spontaneity and gave him more confidence with his writing." -- Zack Barangan writing about Carr's visit last weekend to some kind of NYU blogging class.
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 4:56 PM on Tuesday, February 28, 2006
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Toughest Job on Oscar Night
Toughest Job on Oscar Night Award contenders, from a piece in Time magazine: (a) Jennifer Aniston's publicist: Has Jen seen Brangelina's sonogram? Will she attend the shower? Red carpet chatterboxes have many rude questions for this presenter. Wells comment: Those fearless vampire killer questions asked of tabloid victims like Aniston, Brangelina and Tomkat are beyond sickening. (b) Isaac Mizrahi: the grabby E! co-host must keep his hands in his pockets, and off of starlets. Wells comment: More brash tittie feels...go for it, Isaac...make it a lifelong signature thing. (c) Dolly Parton's stylist: O.K., we're not sure she has one, but heck,...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 4:37 PM on Tuesday, February 28, 2006
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Guy goes to see The
Guy goes to see The Pink Panther with his mom, laughs in a weird and too-loud way, audience members complain, and the guy gets thrown out. This is frontier justice, and if I were there I'd probably support the eviction. If you can't keep it together in a movie theatre, you're going to tick people off, and being handicapped is no excuse. This is where the DVD solution comes into play.
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 4:25 PM on Tuesday, February 28, 2006
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I failed to mention in
I failed to mention in an earlier riff about Warner Home Video's All The President's Men double-disc special edition DVD that it contains three brilliant mini-documentaries by Los Angeles-based documentarian Gary Leva, and that two of these are especially valuable and noteworthy because they're serious looks at the state of U.S. journalism today rather than typical celebrate-the-movie puff pieces. They're basically about how journalism has gone downhill since the days of Watergate and, by implication, how attempts to muscle journalists under the Bush administration are just as bad if not worse today than they were under the Nixon administration in the early...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 2:57 PM on Tuesday, February 28, 2006
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Here's a gripping piece by
Here's a gripping piece by N.Y. Times writer Juan Forero (it ran last Sunday, 2.26) about 32 year-old Rachel Boynton's just- opened documentary Our Brand of Crisis (Koch Lorber), a behind-the-scenes look at how U.S. campaign strategists (including James Carville) helped the faltering campaign of Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada during a run for president of Bolivia in 2002. Boynton asks "whether Mr. Carville and company, in selling a pro-globalization, pro-American candidate, can export American-style campaigning and values to a country so fundamentally different from the United States," Forero writes. "I wanted to make clear that this is a story that does...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 2:20 PM on Tuesday, February 28, 2006
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"If Crash wins the Best
"If Crash wins the Best Picture Oscar, it won't just take home a statuette [but will] claim a new title: the most indefensible Best Picture winner since 1956's tax shelter spectacle Around the World in 80 Days," says Matt Zoller Seitz on his "House Next Door" blog. "Yes, I admit, the movie's more primally exciting than, say, American Beauty or A Beautiful Mind or The English Patient, and more superficially 'edgy.' But it's also dumber and meaner and uglier, an Importance Machine that rolls over you like a tank." Wow...no one I've read has slammed Paul Haggis's film quite as...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 1:23 PM on Tuesday, February 28, 2006
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Does the crocodile grab hold
Does the crocodile grab hold of the bungee jumper and drag him under and presumably eat the poor guy in this "Crocodile Bungee" short? I've watched it six times and I don't see any evidence of the bungee jumper bouncing above in the aftermath but...no! It's bullshit, according to Snopes.com....fake footage put together by some guys working on a Foster's TV ad.
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 1:19 PM on Tuesday, February 28, 2006
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Sidney Lumet talking about Network
Sidney Lumet talking about Network on the occasion of the new 30th anniversary double DVD, mostly for perspective but also because Lumet's Find Me Guilty is hitting theatres on 3.17.
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 11:30 AM on Tuesday, February 28, 2006
Monday, February 27, 2006
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Guilty Surprise
Guilty Surprise
Sidney Lumet's Find Me Guilty (Freestyle, 3.17) isn't just about the rebirth of Lumet's career (at age 82!) and that of his star, Vin Diesel. It's also a kind of Damon Runyon-esque joyride -- an ethnic-Italian, New York-attitude sociopath movie for those who wink at the bad guys and chuckle when they manage to maneuver their way around the law.
Maybe I'm jaded or I've just been Godfather-ed and Soprano-ed into submission, but I bought into most of it and felt pretty much delighted with the care that went into the making of it, and the final ambiguity of...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 5:56 PM on Monday, February 27, 2006
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Warner Home Video's DVD of
Warner Home Video's DVD of The New World (due 5.9.06) will offer the shorter 132-minute version that was put into theatres in mid January, which I imagine will disappoint Manohla Dargis and other fans of the 149-minute version that critics and NY/LA audiences saw in November-December. The only extras, I'm told, will be a 60-minute "making of" documentary plus the theatrical trailer. 
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 3:35 PM on Monday, February 27, 2006
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Jacques Audiard's The Beat That
Jacques Audiard's The Beat That My Heart Skipped, which was curiously ignored by the Oscars as a Best Foreign Language Feature nominee, won eight Cesar awards last Satuday night in Paris, including ones for Best Film and Best Director. Audiard's podium speech included a salute to James Toback, whose 1978 film Fingers was the remake inspriation for Heart. Best Actor prize went to Michel Bouquet in The Last Mitterrand . Variety reports that "demonstrators outside Paris' Chatelet Theater came inside, took to the stage and refused to budge, holding up the start of the televised ceremony by 20 minutes to mixed reactions...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 3:11 PM on Monday, February 27, 2006
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"Your analysis of David Grubin's
"Your analysis of David Grubin's LBJ doc is dead on," says Overnight co-director Tony Montana. "He's absolutely my favorite president. No one knows what he went through and how hard he tried. He demonstrated a higher threshold for dealing with adversity than any president I've ever aware of. I recently picked my favorite docs for Hot Dog magazine and that film was my number one choice, ahead of Steve James' Hoop Dreams. (Here's an interview with Montana in an issue of 78 magazine that hit newstands last week.)
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 2:32 PM on Monday, February 27, 2006
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I'm working on setting up
I'm working on setting up a Reader Response page on each and every article and WIRED item that goes up, so that each and every letter in response to whatever will be fully viewable to everyone. Coming in a couple of weeks, give or take. I'm also going to set up a Trailer of the Week thing in which the weeks' best trailer-teaser will be highlighted in a prominent box or frame somewhere on the main page, with some kind of smart critique with links. (This will basically replace the defunct Trailer Trash.) Nothing revolutionary, but...
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 2:20 PM on Monday, February 27, 2006
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Film critic TV guys Roger
Film critic TV guys Roger Ebert and Richard Roeper echoed the sentiments of HE reader "III Rathbun" on Sunday's (2.26) show in saying they'd love to see legendary director Robert Altman let fly with his core feelings about the mainstream Hollywood establishment when he accepts his career Oscar on Sunday, 3.5. I'll never forget my asking Altman about the Los Angeles riots of '92 when I ran into him at the Cannes Film Festival in their immediate wake. Knowing I was reporting for Entertainment Weekly, he said, "This subject is too important to be discussed in your magazine." How...
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 1:56 PM on Monday, February 27, 2006
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What changes in the style
What changes in the style and tone of Oscar telecast is David Thomson precisely suggesting? He's basically saying make it looser and goosier...like the MTV Awards. "I'd...give Oscars for the best deal, the best promotion campaign, the most outrageous agent of the year," he wrotes. "I'd give a chutzpah award -- while the term chutzpah is still understood. All because people are in love with the business more than the story. I'd cut the show in half. I'd make it a dinner party again, instead of an awkward theatrical event." Thomson would also make the awards for the technical CGI compositions a...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 1:38 PM on Monday, February 27, 2006
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Fuck the perfect gown..fuck the
Fuck the perfect gown..fuck the wow factor...fuck designer- grovelling. All right, it's dishonest of me to say this because I like watching the hot ladies on the red carpet as much as anyone else, but who will be the actress of distinction and character who wears something coolly stylish but different? Who holds back and maybe wears something that doesn't indicate a desperate attempt to make a big impression with Isaac Mizrahi and win praise from the fashion writers and choice placement in the trashy supermarket magazines in their post-Oscar issues? Something a bit masucline...a touch of 1930s bisexual Marlene...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 1:07 PM on Monday, February 27, 2006
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It's interesting, I think, that
It's interesting, I think, that Fox 411 columnist Roger Friedman is on the V for Vendetta train, since his Fox News employers have reason to greatly despise this lefty political pic.
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 1:02 PM on Monday, February 27, 2006
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This is three-week-old news, but
This is three-week-old news, but DV Republic is claiming that the great Harry Belafonte (whom I met during the junket of White Man's Burden, and whose come-what-may candor I found enormously appealing) was disinvited from funeral services for Coretta Scott King because of the attendance of President George Bush, according to "reliable sources." Belafonte's been a tough critic of Bush policies in recent weeks, and apparently was kept from the funeral "in deference to Bush's comfort." Belafonte was one of the first big-time celebs to join forces with Martin Luther King in the early '60s, and "not only contributed...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 12:12 PM on Monday, February 27, 2006
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It's really spooky about how
It's really spooky about how the rule of three -- celebrities always seeming to leave the earth in trios within the same two- or three-day period -- keeps happening. I was on the verge of saying it hadn't occured last weekend with the deaths of Darren McGavin and Don Knotts, but now comes the news of Dennis Weaver's passing in Connecticut last Friday. The three actors were all in their early '80s and had their greatest triumphs on television in the '50-s, '60s and '70s. Weaver called his Sam McCloud character, based on an Arizona lawman played by Clint Eastwood in Don...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 11:37 AM on Monday, February 27, 2006
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I was looking at this
I was looking at this Ramey pix micro-shot (top left) this morning of Dyan Cannon, giving what looks like the finger to the guy shooting this photo of her and Jim Carrey at a Laker's game. (I may be wrong...it's a small image.) It led me, in any event, to this Christian website story about Cannon having become "an evangelist to the Hollywood community" with her Saturday night "God's Party with Dyan Cannon & You," at the CBS Studio Center in Studio City. Visitors "range from Hollywood insiders to people from all across the incredible diversity of the L.A. community," with...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 11:13 AM on Monday, February 27, 2006
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In June, Warner Home Video
In June, Warner Home Video will finally cough up a DVD of one of the most intriguing late-'60s era films ever made: Richard Lester's brilliant, wonderfully textured, time-jumpy Petulia (1968). (WHV has it on the DVD market in England right now.) It's about an impulsive, airy-fairy wife (Julie Christie) half- cheating on her stiff-necked husband (Richard Chamberlain) with a vulnerably grumpy divorced surgeon (George C. Scott) whom she's deeply in love with...as far as it goes. Shot in San Francisco during the flower-power summer of '67, Petulia mixes antsy energy with a bittersweet tone of regret about slipped-away love. 
...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 9:29 AM on Monday, February 27, 2006
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Well, whoop-dee-doo...Universal production chief Stacey
Well, whoop-dee-doo...Universal production chief Stacey Snider made a firm call on Sunday to become chief executive and co-chairperson of DreamWorks...as if everyone was on pins and needles wondering if she'd stay with Universal. (Hah!) Snider will share the same creative and corporate authority that DreamWorks founders David Geffen and Steven Spielberg hold, and will report directly to management genius Brad Grey, the chairman and CEO of Paramount, which bought DreamWorks in December for $1.6 billion. The Snider thing was a Geffen move, of course. Hiring Snider was Geffen basically giving NBC/Universal's owner General Electric (and its chairman and CEO...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 12:32 AM on Monday, February 27, 2006
Sunday, February 26, 2006
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If someone wants to give
If someone wants to give me free-of-charge a Blu-Ray or HD-DVD player, a big stack of high-def DVDs and a really good high-def widescreen TV, I'm an instant fan. But having seen demon- strations of both Sony's Blu-Ray high-def player and its Toshiba-manufactured HD-DVD competition, I can honestly say that the difference between them and how DVD's look right now on my big Sony flat-screen is noticable, yes, but not stunningly so. High-def is very cool, but it doesn't quite make you wet yourself. The only ones who will shell out for these goodies are rich industry elitists (producers and directors...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 3:07 PM on Sunday, February 26, 2006
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Profile of an eternal lightweight...a
Profile of an eternal lightweight...a guy with not even a trickle running through him, much less a river.
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 3:04 PM on Sunday, February 26, 2006
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No question that the Criterion
No question that the Criterion Collection's high-def transfer of Robert Bresson's Au hasard Balthazar 1966) is one of the most beautiful ever seen. But I don't get the website claim that says the image is "presented in its original aspect ratio of 1.66:1." Looks more like 1.75 to 1 to me, and damn close to 1.85 to 1. Consider the shot below (top) of the opening image from Warner Home Video's DVD of Stanley Kubrick's Barry Lyndon, as it appears on my own TV. This, according to the info provided by WHV, is a 1.66 to 1 image, and my trained...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 1:22 PM on Sunday, February 26, 2006
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Running Scared's Paul Walker, who
Running Scared's Paul Walker, who acted in Clint Eastwood's Flags of Our Fathers last year, says, "I grew up on Eastwood [but] I was afraid that I was going to be completely let down. I'd heard nothing but good things about him, but I guess I'm a bit cynical. Like, who's going to talk trash about Clint Eastwood? I mean, c'mon, the guy's on top of his game right now, you have no choice but to say you like him. But you know, he is a good guy. He's not real wordy. He's not the kind of guy that likes to...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 11:43 AM on Sunday, February 26, 2006
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I spoke to Lamont Johnson
I spoke to Lamont Johnson a few minutes ago, and he says the cut of The Last American Hero that Pauline Kael saw and reviewed back in early '73 ran "10 or 12 minutes" longer than the 95-minute version of the current Fox Home Video DVD. He doesn't know if the longer version exists anywhere, but his agent might.
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 11:26 AM on Sunday, February 26, 2006
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Prosecutors are squeezing "Hollywood superlawyer"
Prosecutors are squeezing "Hollywood superlawyer" Bert Fields with "evidence" against Fields and/or his partners regarding arrangements Fields may have made with Anthony Pellicano that may have involved illegal wiretapping, according to a N.Y. Times story by David Halbfinger and Allison Hope Weiner. They want him to spill, of course. The net is closing. Perspiration beads are forming.
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 10:30 AM on Sunday, February 26, 2006
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Yesterday morning's projection about Madea's
Yesterday morning's projection about Madea's Family Reunion was accurate: Box Office Mojo is estimating that Tyler Perry's film will finish the weekend with $30.3 million. And that Frank Marshall's Eight Below, an inoffensively decent dog movie, will earn $15.7 million for a cume of $45.1 million, and that Shawn Levy's The Pink Panther...forget it.
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 10:19 AM on Sunday, February 26, 2006
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Marc Weingarten's N.Y. Times article
Marc Weingarten's N.Y. Times article about Lamont Johnson's The Last American Hero being revived as a DVD release 33 years after being dumped, re-cut and then re-released by 20th Century Fox in 1973 is an okay recap, but it leaves out a significant detail. He reports that while Johnson was out of the country following the film's initial release, "Fox made a number of edits [and] renamed the movie Hard Driver and released it in a few theaters in the South in spring 1973." Then Pauline Kael wrote "a glowing review for The New Yorker," saying that The Last American Hero...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 8:44 AM on Sunday, February 26, 2006
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Don Knotts' N.Y. Times obit
Don Knotts' N.Y. Times obit says he was one of the original cast members of "The Steve Allen Show," the comedy-variety show from the mid to late '50's, and was one of a group of memorable comics backing Mr. Allen." But it says nothing about Knotts' "Mr. Morrison" character, and not getting into this a little is like writing a Lana Turner obit without mentioning William Wilkerson and Schwab's drug store. On the Museum of TV Broadcasting site, it says that "Allen's man-in-the-street interview segments launched the careers of comedians Bill Dana, Pat Harrington, Louis Nye, Tom Poston and Don Knotts....Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 7:50 AM on Sunday, February 26, 2006
Saturday, February 25, 2006
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"I would love to see
"I would love to see Robert Altman take the stage at the Oscars next Sunday and give this speech: 'I thank Hollywood and The Academy for absolutely nothing, and I dedicate this award to Ingmar Berman, Alfred Hitchcock, Martin Scorsese, Stanley Kubrick, Akira Kurosawa, Orson Welles and Frederico Fellini -- all of whom, like myself, succeeded primarily outside the Hollywood circle, and have never been recognized by the Academy for any achievement whatsoever.' Then he would leave the Oscar on the podium as he walks off the stage." -- a reader identified as "III Rathbun." (In fact, Welles shared the Best Original Screenplay...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 8:57 PM on Saturday, February 25, 2006
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I heard Darren McGavin died
I heard Darren McGavin died early today, but the big news sites weren't on it. The IMDB still doesn't have it as I write this at 8:45 pm on Saturday. It was only Ain't It Cool News, and apologies to Harry but I didn't quite feel safe. So I called McGavin's son Beau and his daughter Graemme (whom I've known pretty well since '82) and nothing. Then Beau just called back and confirmed. Very sorry. A memorial service is set for Sunday, March 5, at Hollywood Forever.
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 8:45 PM on Saturday, February 25, 2006
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A smart and funny N.Y.
A smart and funny N.Y. Times piece by Allison Hope Weiner on the tribal customs of Oscar partying. I've been given a very hard time by dates in the past for not introducing them at parties when I'm speaking to some big-name actor or director or studio guy (they're right -- it's a bit thoughtless), but Weiner's first rule of Oscar party etiquette ("an oxymoron," someone says) is "IF YOU'RE SOMEONE'S DATE, DON'T EXPECT TO BE INTRODUCED." She says that "no one cares about spouses, relatives and arm-candy at Hollywood parties. You could be a Nobel laureate, but if you're a plus-one...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 12:55 PM on Saturday, February 25, 2006
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Poor Daniel Craig, whom the
Poor Daniel Craig, whom the old-line fans despise for having been cast as James Bond in the currently-shooting Casino Royale, is getting more support, this time from Die Another Day villain Toby Stephens who calls hiring Craig to play 007 "inspired" and says he takes the character "back to its roots." Craig is "a serious actor and doesn't look like a traditional Bond," said Stephens. "He's a very dark actor and a very interesting one, and I think he will be brilliant. It will reinvigorate the whole thing. It is not going to be to everyone's taste but that is the thing...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 11:33 AM on Saturday, February 25, 2006
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Hey, this Robert Koehler Variety
Hey, this Robert Koehler Variety review of Richard Donner's 16 Blocks (Warner Bros., 3.3) makes it sound pretty good. "The last chance of an aging cop" -- Bruce Willis -- "to redeem his soured existence provides the sturdy frame...closer to a compact film noir than to the many gimmicky entertainments of [Donner's] past...not up to the level of Sidney Lumet's Gotham police pics, [but] it does raise the banner for the tradition of the textured urban cop drama...told mostly in real time, pic sticks to its guns as a spare account of how a routine transport of a witness to a...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 11:07 AM on Saturday, February 25, 2006
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Liam Neeson, whom I spoke
Liam Neeson, whom I spoke to twice last summer about making his Abraham Lincoln voice sound just right when he finally starts shooting that Lincoln biopic for Steven Spielberg, "tried out his Lincoln chops before a live audience last week on C-SPAN," reports "Page Six" in the N.Y. Post. "The Irish actor brought the crowd at the Library of Congress to its feet with his rendition -- brogue-free -- of the Gettysburg Address. The 'Lincoln Family Album' reading, narrated on-air by N.Y.-based Lincoln scholar Harold Holzer, drew a big audience and will be rerun by C-SPAN in April. Holly Hunter"...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 10:28 AM on Saturday, February 25, 2006
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Tyler Perry's Madea's Family Reunion,
Tyler Perry's Madea's Family Reunion, which would have gotten killed by critics if Lionsgate had been dumb enough to show it to them (they weren't and they didn't), took in $10,169,000 yesterday (Friday, 2.24) on 2194 screens, and will end up with something like $30 million for the weekend. (My source believes "they had about 800 screens they didn't need...some of those theatres are like bowling alleys." Len Klady at Movie City News says Madea took in a bit more -- $10.5 million.) The other two wide releases, Doogal (Weinstein Co.) and Running Scared (New Line), both tanked. The former, which...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 9:29 AM on Saturday, February 25, 2006
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George Clooney and pal Les
George Clooney and pal Les Moonves intend to re-do Network on CBS. One assumes they believe that Paddy Chayefsky's dialogue can be performed better than, say, what Bill Holden, Robert Duvall and Faye Dunaway did with it in this scene from Sidney Lumet's original 1976 feature. (It's lifted from the new Network double-disc DVD, which has a very fine making-of doc and a great-looking transfer -- like the film just came out of the lab.) I don't care what Clooney and Moonves think -- this can't be improved upon, and if they want a challenge they should take an old movie...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 12:08 AM on Saturday, February 25, 2006
Friday, February 24, 2006
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Universal chairwoman Stacey Snider is
Universal chairwoman Stacey Snider is almost certainly going to take "a significant pay cut" to run the Paramount-based DreamWorks, with a task of overseeing four to six films instead of the sixteen to eighteen she watches over at Universal each year. And she'll be able to spend more time with her two daughters... great. But who really cares about this development, outside of those whose jobs and movies will be affected? A nice woman is going to switch jobs...big deal.
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 11:25 PM on Friday, February 24, 2006
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When it comes to burning
When it comes to burning one's flesh, context is everything. In Lawrence of Arabia, Peter O'Toole's willingness to singe his fingertips indicates a curiously likable apartness...a certain charisma...especially when he says that the trick is "not minding" that it hurts. When Hal Holbrook talks about Gordon Liddy having held his hand over a candle at a Washington party and offering the same answer when someone asks "what's the trick?", it indicates a slight nutter mentality -- somebody you don't want to get too close to.
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 8:01 PM on Friday, February 24, 2006
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The Guardian's Sharon Krum takes
The Guardian's Sharon Krum takes another look at how women directors are faring these days, or rather the view of same by "guerrilla girls" (www.moviesbywomen.com) Kathe Kollwitz and Tara Veneruso.
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 7:17 PM on Friday, February 24, 2006
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I missed this yesterday, but
I missed this yesterday, but Ain't It Cool's "Quint" is hearing that Eric Bana is in negotiations to play the Van Heflin role (the good guy) in the remake of 3:10 to Yuma, in which Tom Cruise is reportedly hot to play the Glenn Ford villain role. A few minutes ago I asked director James Mangold whether the Bana thing is likely or half-true, but he didn't answer my Cruise question yesterday so I guess we'll have to wait for Variety's Michael Fleming to announce it.
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 5:03 PM on Friday, February 24, 2006
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Zap2It's Daniel Fienberg again, this
Zap2It's Daniel Fienberg again, this time about my riff about industry attitudes and hurdles commonly thrown in front of women filmmakers: "You're gonna get plenty of angry e-mails regarding your comments about female directors, but the point is this: white male filmmakers don't need to go out of their way to tackle issues important to white males, because there are oodles of films out there showing just how darned difficult and complicated it is to be a white male. Somebody like Curtis Hanson can step outside of his personal interest group to direct an In Her Shoes because he can sleep knowing that...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 4:01 PM on Friday, February 24, 2006
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Congrats to Hollywood Reporter columnist
Congrats to Hollywood Reporter columnist and blogger Anne Thompson for landing an Oscar-day gig as an ABC red-carpet chit-chat commentator (along with Leonard Maltin and Joel Siegel) during the network's pre-Oscar coverage, which will start sometime around 3 pm on March 5th. ABC wanted a woman critic and general industry know-it-all to round things out with Maltin and Siegel, and Thompson is a perfect choice. I'm told the producers first went to N.Y. Times film critic Manohla Dargis but the notoriously camera-shy scribe begged off.
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 2:54 PM on Friday, February 24, 2006
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David Germain's AP story about
David Germain's AP story about Brokeback Mountain fading and Crash looking more and more like it might actually take the Best Picture Oscar gets your blood going a little, but it seems to me like a Big Reach. If it happens, I know a lot of people who will scream and shout and throw things and punch the refrigerator. But not me. Brokeback is a breakthrough movie of lasting importance and impact. It's already "won" in so many different ways that not winning the big Oscar prize won't hurt all that much, although there will be those who will strongly disagree. A...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 2:42 PM on Friday, February 24, 2006
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"Just saw V Is For
"Just saw V Is For Vendetta (Warner Bros., 3.17) at an A-list screening [in Manhattan] and you can tell the crowd thinks the conservative-values, government-allied network is Fox News," a New York critic confides. "And the Bill O'Reilly stand-in gets it in the shower. The movie, for me, is a really great ride at the beginning and the end but there's way too much in the middle. I don't know what I would take out -- the torture scenes are great even if the payoff is obvious -- but there's a lot of long exposition. And you have to agree what starts out...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 1:35 PM on Friday, February 24, 2006
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At the start of her
At the start of her column piece about Don't Tell director Cristina Comencini, who is the only female director behind all of this year's Oscar-nominated films, Anne Thompson asks, "What is it with Italian female directors and the Oscars? In 78 years, only three women -- Italy's Lena Wertmuller (Seven Beauties), Australia's Jane Campion (The Piano), and Hollywood's Sofia Coppola (Lost in Translation) -- have been nominated for best director." (The New Zealand-born Campion apparently comes from Italian stock -- I know she went to Perugia as a young woman to learn to speak Italian.) The reason more female directors haven't been...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 11:23 AM on Friday, February 24, 2006
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Latino Review's Kellvin Chavez is
Latino Review's Kellvin Chavez is reporting that Joaquin Phoenix has to pay the bills like anyone else, and has therefore agreed to play the lead in John Singleton's Without Remorse for Paramount Pictures. Pic will be an origin story thriller about how an Elite Navy Seal Commando named John Kelly becomes the C.I.A. operative known as Mr. Clark, the pivotal recurring character in Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan books who was played by Willem Dafoe in Clear and Present Danger and Liev Schreiber in The Sum of All Fears. No offense, but with Singleton directing there isn't a snowball's chance in hell that...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 10:44 AM on Friday, February 24, 2006
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Zap2It's Daniel Fienberg reviews Madea's
Zap2It's Daniel Fienberg reviews Madea's Family Reunion, feeling more or less the same as I. The film hasn't been screened for critics so there's nothing out there. As I said in my Wednesday review, guys like me so aren't the point.
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 10:30 AM on Friday, February 24, 2006
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Roger Ebert is offering positive
Roger Ebert is offering positive and thoughtful reasons for his prediction that Crash will take the Best Picture Oscar, but in my mind he's essentially predicting that older-Academy- member homophobia is going to ultimately call the tune. I think it's a tiny bit derelict of Roger to not at least acknowledge what I've been referring to as the Tony Curtis factor. The 81 year-old actor was widely quoted as saying he "hasn't seen the heavily Oscar-nominated picture and probably won't, and the same is true for other Academy members," adding that "Howard Hughes and John Wayne wouldn't like it." And surely...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 9:42 AM on Friday, February 24, 2006
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Robert Redford on how he
Robert Redford on how he got interested in wanting to make a movie about Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, who wrote the early stories indicating there was some kind of White House involvement in the June 1972 Watergate break-in. And his attempts to get in touch with Woodward in '72 and '73, and initially getting blown off. Excerpted from Redford's commentary track on the just-released two-disc special edition DVD of All The President's Men.
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 12:07 AM on Friday, February 24, 2006
Thursday, February 23, 2006
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"Truman Capote was short --
"Truman Capote was short -- 5 foot, 3 inches -- and spoke in a strange, high-pitched Southern accent. He was a wildly camp gay who effortlessly held whole parties in thrall with his anecdotal brilliance and cool outrageousness. I have always remem- bered one story about him, which I hope is true. At the height of his fame, a lady spotted him in a restaurant, rushed over and asked him to autograph her breast. Capote did so. Her husband, incensed, strode over, took out his penis and suggested Capote might like to autograph that too. "Well," responded Capote, "perhaps I could initial it."...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 11:02 PM on Thursday, February 23, 2006
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"To his credit, Gavin Hood's
"To his credit, Gavin Hood's meditation on truth and reconciliation doesn't traffic in the cheap thrills of art-house exploitation, like City of God; he wrings tears with sincerity, not cynicism." -- N.Y. Times critic Manohla Dargis on Tsotsi.
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 4:28 PM on Thursday, February 23, 2006
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New York journalist Lewis Beale
New York journalist Lewis Beale acknowledges there's "no buzz" on Sidney Lumet's Find Me Guilty (Freestyle/Yari Film Group, 3.17), but says "it's quite good and contains a really fine performance by no less than Vin Diesel. It's the true story of the longest criminal trial in U.S. history, involving members of the Lucchese gang, and Diesel plays a low-level mobster who decides to defend himself. Given that 90% of the movie takes place inside a courtroom it's still quite watchable (Lumet is an old hand at procedurals in this vein -- Prince of the City, Twelve Angry Men). And it has one of...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 4:14 PM on Thursday, February 23, 2006
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In a run-up to tomorrow's
In a run-up to tomorrow's debut of Madea's Family Reunion, here's a Salon piece about the Tyler Perry phenomenon by Russell Scott Smith. "Blacks and whites don't always understand each other," it begins. "But in Hollywood, everyone's favorite color is green. So movie executives of all races took notice last February when a movie called Diary of a Mad Black Woman hit No. 1 at the box office -- despite no bankable stars, scant mainstream press attention and reviews that were almost laughably bad. 'Downright awful,' 'an absolute mess' and 'one of the worst pictures in ages,' critics wailed. Salon's Stephanie Zacharek...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 2:59 PM on Thursday, February 23, 2006
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That website put up by
That website put up by old-line James Bond fans that's basically about trashing Daniel Craig is back up after going down earlier today. The anti-Craig thing is a bore anyway. He's a well-planted actor with a cold flinty interior, which is precisely what the Bond films haven't had since Sean Connery walked. So he's not quite as tall...big deal. As Roger Moore says....
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 2:19 PM on Thursday, February 23, 2006
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I'm using this conversation with
I'm using this conversation with Running Scared director Wayne Kramer to fill up most of today's "Elsewhere Live" broadcast, but here it is in advance. Kramer talks for a bit about his next film, Evilseek, a satanic supernatural thriller mixed with social commentary that Kramer describes as "Heaven Can Wait meets Seven." The Weinstein Co. production will star Thomas Jane (or Tom Jane...which is it?) with lensing to begin in the late spring or early summer.
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 1:19 PM on Thursday, February 23, 2006
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Went to one of the
Went to one of the most serenely cool parties of my Hollywood life last night -- a gathering for Capote's director Bennett Miller, thrown by his agents at Endeavor, inside a candle-lit sixth- floor suite at the Chateau Marmont with a sizable, south-facing balcony. Low-key, not crowded, soothing (the view of West Hollywood is what did it), waiters constantly hovering with hors d'oeuvres. Plus a few prominent names to lend a certain punctuation -- Naomi Watts, Adam Sandler (whose next film, Reign O'er Me for director-writer Mike Binder, will start shooting in a week or two), Jake Gyllenhaal, Capote screenwriter Dan Futterman, Tobey...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 12:43 PM on Thursday, February 23, 2006
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The thing that killed the
The thing that killed the belief in Will Ferrell being a hot star, I gather, is the relatively paltry $62 million and change earned by Bewitched last summer. It didn't make more, producers and agents decided, because Ferrell can't be and never will be a romantic star (not with that chest-hair problem). And now there's a faint aroma of concern over his next big studio movie, Stranger Than Fiction (Columbia, November '06). Directed by Marc Forster (Neverland, Monster's Ball) from a clever script by last year's hip-screenwriter-of-the-moment Zach Helm, it costars Maggie Gyllenhaal (as Ferrell's romantic interest), Dustin Hoffman, Queen Latifah,...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 9:41 AM on Thursday, February 23, 2006
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This is most definitely a
This is most definitely a movie that I would pay to see. (A significant admission from a journo freeloader like myself.) Earlier this week six armed British thieves nabbed $40 million pounds in cash (which is what...roughly $75 million U.S.?) in the area of Kent. It's not just the size of the haul that gets me, but how exactly do six guys hold on to that much dough (roughly $12,500,000 U.S. dollars each) without someone getting wind and ratting them out? How do they get the cash out of the country? Is it smarter to try to move the whole load and...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 9:22 AM on Thursday, February 23, 2006
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This Peter Howell blog riff
This Peter Howell blog riff (basically a q & a with himself) underlines the general consensus that the last possible cliffhanger element in the March 5th Oscar telecast -- i.e., will it be Cinderella Man's Paul Giamatti or Syriana's George Clooney taking the Best Supporting Actor Oscar? -- has been settled. Clooney will win it because he's the charming get-around Guy of the Moment, and has been credited with doing the most to launch the current wave of political films, and because Academy folks want to hand him something for Good Night and Good Luck and most of them know that this...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 9:06 AM on Thursday, February 23, 2006
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Tom Cruise is reportedly keen
Tom Cruise is reportedly keen to play the Glenn Ford bad-guy role in James Mangold's forthcoming remake of 3:10 to Yuma, a 1957 black-and-white western directed by Delmer Daves and co-starring Van Heflin. (I've never seen this High noon-type drama, but something tells me I'll be looking at the DVD fairly soon.) And yet, according to Variety's Michael Fleming, Cruise hadn't even sat down with Mangold to chew things over. He just likes Stuart Beattie's rewrite of the Michael Brandt-Derek Haas script, and has funnelled news of his interest to Fleming. If the Yuma thing happens it'll be Cruise...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 9:04 AM on Thursday, February 23, 2006
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Is Stuart Beattie prolific or
Is Stuart Beattie prolific or what? The 3:10 to Yuma re-writer (who broke into the big-time with his Collateral screenplay) and Baz Luhrman have co-written "a sweeping Aussie [period] romance in the tradition of Gone with the Wind" that will costar Russell Crowe and Nicole Kidman, according to Dark Horizons. "Despite the amusing working title of 'Project Oklahoma', Luhrmann says that 'it's not a musical [but] uses the sweeping landscape of Australia and spans from the mid-1930s to the bombing of Darwin during World War II." Luhrman says he's going the non-CGI, Lawrence of Arabia route in the filming of the big...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 8:52 AM on Thursday, February 23, 2006
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Variety's Justin Chang is calling
Variety's Justin Chang is calling Wayne Kramer's Running Scared "a ferociously energetic piece of filmmaking," a "potent" and "nasty little number offering a harrowing descent into a New Jersey underworld replete with hoods, hookers and hot merchandise." Wait a minute...this New Jersy-based thriller was shot largely in Prague? Odd. I've been there three or four times and didn't spot a hint of this.
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 8:19 AM on Thursday, February 23, 2006
Wednesday, February 22, 2006
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"Sexy tomboy beanpole" Keira Knightley
"Sexy tomboy beanpole" Keira Knightley is the statistical favorite to win the Best Actress Oscar on March 5th. Film Jerk has run the numbers and balanced it all out, and this is how it shakes down. Really. She's not expected to actually win, but...
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 12:05 PM on Wednesday, February 22, 2006
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A Matt Dillon interview by
A Matt Dillon interview by the AP's Jake Coyle ran on 2.21, and of course -- naturally! -- the piece manages to refer to Dillon's City of Ghosts, his directorial debut that I saw and quite admired in March of '03, in terms of its financial failure instead of how atmospherically pungent and dramatically haunting it was as a film. I described it thusly: "A guy on the lam, a sense of existential flotation, an exotic Southeast Asian locale full of offbeat eccentrics, a running away from one's self only to be faced with a final ethical reckoning -- yup, this...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 11:18 AM on Wednesday, February 22, 2006
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Variety's Ben Fritz noted last
Variety's Ben Fritz noted last Sunday that "if there's one thing the Academy can't be accused of this year, it's catering to popular whims," adding that "in a year when the five best picture nominees combined grossed only about $200 million domestic- ally, and four of them can be called hits only compared with their low budgets, some argue there's a profound disconnect between what appeals to the industry vs. the public at large." What...that lament again? Oscar winners need to be big money-makers or they somehow aren't legit? Shit, sonny. "But it's not just the Best Picture nominees. Across the...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 10:56 AM on Wednesday, February 22, 2006
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Variety has finally run Robert
Variety has finally run Robert Koehler's review of Who Is Harry Nilsson (and Why Is Everybody Talkin' About Him)? more than two weeks after it played the Santa Barbara Film Festival, but the review has two errors. The boozy rock genius died on January 15, 1994 (doc says that his funeral service happened on the day of the big '94 California quake, or 1.17.94) and not '92, as Koehler has it, and Nilsson's hot song "Coconut" (as in "put the lime in the...") was heard in Reservoir Dogs but was not "notoriously revived in the [Michael Madsen, ear-amputation] torture sequence" -- that...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 8:50 AM on Wednesday, February 22, 2006
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Intriguing Guardian piece by Paul
Intriguing Guardian piece by Paul Hoggart about a new Nick Broomfield doc called His Big White Self, about Eugene Terre Blanche, the "hippo-shaped, rhino-tempered" leader of South Africa's extreme racist Afrikaner Resistance Front. It's being aired 2.27 on British TV along with a retrospective of Broomfield's past docs (Biggie and Tupac, Kurt and Courtney, etc.) Hoggart mentions that`Broomfield is "busy editing his first original drama, based on the death of Chinese cockle-pickers in Morecambe Bay, which is due to screen later this year." This naturally raises the question, "Whatever happened to Indecent Exposure?" Two or three years ago Broomfield was developing and...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 8:10 AM on Wednesday, February 22, 2006
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It's fair to ask why
It's fair to ask why Patrick Goldstein's Gail Berman column hasn't been linked on Movie City News as of this morning (i.e., Wednesday, 2.22). The "Big Picture" author has gone after MCN's David Poland two or three times (most recently in that piece he ran in December about blogs over-hyping the Oscar race). This history seems to imply that MCN (which links to just about everything and anything) is ignoring Goldstein as a kind of get-back. I find this surprising because Poland is nothing if not thorough -- very little happens in the movie realm that escapes MCN's linkage, and the...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 7:47 AM on Wednesday, February 22, 2006
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Wellspring's theatrical distribution operation is
Wellspring's theatrical distribution operation is being shuttered and the Weinstein Co.-controlled operation will henceforth be based in Santa Monica and focus entirely on DVD distribution. (And I never got paid for that Reel Paradise ad I ran last summer...shit. Has that train left the station or can I chase it down and talk to the conductor?) The spiritual loss will be felt. Any distributor that puts films like Werner Herzog's The White Diamond, Jacques Audiard's The Beat That My Heart Skipped, Arnaud Desplechin's Kings and Queen, Vincent Gallo's The Brown Bunny and Jonathan Caouette's Tarnation (among many others) into theatres is...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 7:31 AM on Wednesday, February 22, 2006
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A decent, boilerplate, right-down-the-middle piece
A decent, boilerplate, right-down-the-middle piece about the social legacy of Brokeback Mountain by USA Today's Scott Bowles (with help from Anthony Breznican). Many celebrity quotes, same old territory. But at the end of the piece along comes Judy Shepard, mother of the murdered gay martyr Matthew Shepard, telling Bowles that her son "gave her a copy" of the Annie Proulx short story that inspired the film. "She doubts the movie will have an immediate effect on gay rights 'because some people are ashamed to go see it,'" Bowles writes, quoting Shepard. "'Even some of my friends -- my friends -- say it's...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 7:16 AM on Wednesday, February 22, 2006
Tuesday, February 21, 2006
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Of all these godawful titles
Of all these godawful titles in Mark Caro's "Pop Machine" blog piece, which draws from decades of Hollywood history, none rankle (or have rankled) as profoundly as Oliver Stone's World Trade Center. (Whoops...repeating myself.)
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 6:09 PM on Tuesday, February 21, 2006
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Patrick Goldstein's Big Picture column
Patrick Goldstein's Big Picture column got into the Gail Berman hoo-hah today (Monday, 2.21), and used a quote from that "Scent of Toast" piece that I ran a week ago Sunday, and he was nice enough to say that "it quickly became the talk of the town" when it came out. Two-thirds of it was an edited-down letter I got from a professional woman who has beefs about Berman, and a third was composed of quotes this woman gave me when we spoke on the morning of Sunday, 2.12. After talking for 40 minutes or so she struck me as an...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 5:05 PM on Tuesday, February 21, 2006
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A little touch of Charles
A little touch of Charles Bukowski to pass the time..."The Genius of the Crowd" and "The Soldier, the Wife and the Bum".
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 2:19 PM on Tuesday, February 21, 2006
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When I think back to
When I think back to Peter Jackson's far-reaching, underwhelming King Kong, which arrives on DVD next month, I think of the sad sequence atop the Empire State Building at the very end, with Kong's eyes starting to dilate just before he bids his final farewell to Naomi Watts and then slips away, somehow managing a nice clean fall down to 33rd Street without crashing against the jutting-out sides of the building (like his great- grandfather inevitably did in the '33 version). And that's all that sticks, really. Portions of the running-around-on-Skull-Island stuff were exciting and amusing, but they've been steadly fading since...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 8:22 AM on Tuesday, February 21, 2006
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Flying back to L.A from
Flying back to L.A from San Fran this morning, a Gavin Hood interview this afternoon at the Four Seasons regarding Tsotsi...no further posts until late this afternoon. Okay, maybe one more.
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 7:55 AM on Tuesday, February 21, 2006
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Josh Horowitz talks to director
Josh Horowitz talks to director Whit Stillman (Barcelona, Metropolitan) about his disappearing act. Horowitz: "What about the 'whatever happened to Whit Stillman?' stuff that's been written about you? Does it bother you? Stillman: "That doesn’Äôt bother me. What bothers me is that I haven't done anything." (laughter) Horowitz: "It is noteworthy, I think, to realize that Terrence Malick has released two films in the time since you released your last one." Stillman: "That's embarrassing." (laughter)
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 7:49 AM on Tuesday, February 21, 2006
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Better late than never: N.Y.
Better late than never: N.Y. Times DVD guy Dave Kehr riffs on Lamont Johnson's The Last American Hero ...a longish reflective lead piece and everything. Released in '73, Hero was "the sort of midlevel movie that would soon disappear from Hollywood as American movies fragmented into big-budget event films (Mr. Bridges lent his presence to one, the 1976 remake of King Kong) and no-budget genre pictures. The uncondescending, eye-level view of the American South here seems perfectly pitched, its triumphalism muted (Jeff Bridges' Junior Jackson wins races but has a harder time with his lady love, played with sparkle by Valerie Perrine),...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 7:37 AM on Tuesday, February 21, 2006
Monday, February 20, 2006
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Forbes magazine has asked three
Forbes magazine has asked three critics (Richard Roper, Neil Rosen, Jeffrey Lyons) which are the ten best films ever made about money. What a question! Aren't 80% to 90% of all the films ever made in one way or another about people trying to make, steal, hold onto or somehow get hold of more money? They didn't choose Rififi or Heat or Eric von Stroheim's Greed or L'eclisse...this is lame. The ten they chose suggest their real criteria was choosing the best movies about greed, avarice and scam artists, are Wall Street, Trading Places (what?), The Sting, Boiler Room, Ocean's Eleven ('60...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 2:27 PM on Monday, February 20, 2006
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Here's a mildly amusing N.Y.
Here's a mildly amusing N.Y. Times piece on the "daunting" challenges being faced by Jon Stewart and his team of writers over Stewart's hosting of the Oscar telecast 13 days from now. Screw daunting. The only way to look at Oscar hosting is to assume you won't be asked to return. Just do the job according to your best instincts...as long as they're not like Chris Rock's. Ben Karlin, Stewart's head writer, tells Jacques Steinberg that "when you step outside the process and think about it, you realize that the thing you're working on is going to be seen by more...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 9:34 AM on Monday, February 20, 2006
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David Carr's piece about the
David Carr's piece about the trepidations and nail-bitings over possible indictments stemming from the Anthony Pellicano wire-tapping mess ("A B-Movie Becomes a Blockbuster") is another reason why Carr should continue doing his Carpetbagger column 24/7 after the Oscar race concludes. It's always a tasty read, it's got attitude, and is well-reported and well-written. The wire-tapping case against Pellicano "could ultimately threaten the reputation and even the freedom of some of the entertainment industry's most prominent figures," he notes, and "also serves as a reminder that even though the studios are now just one more adjunct of large media companies, Hollywood has...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 8:09 AM on Monday, February 20, 2006
Sunday, February 19, 2006
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The BAFTA Awards bestowed one
The BAFTA Awards bestowed one very cool award Saturday night: Their Best Film not in the English language honor went to De Battre Mon Coeur S'est Arrete (The Beat that My Heart Skipped (Pascal Caucheteux/ Jacques Audiard). Otherwise their choices were either nationalistically self-serving or way too Hollywood: Best Film -- Brokeback Mountain; Alexander Korda award for outstanding British film of the year (bullshit!) -- Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit; Carl Foreman award for special achievement by a British Director, writer or producer in their first feature film -- Joe Wright (director, Pride & Prejudice; David Lean Award for Achievement...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 10:54 PM on Sunday, February 19, 2006
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Poor Richard Bright (pot-bellied button-man
Poor Richard Bright (pot-bellied button-man Al Neri to Al Pacino's Michael Corleone) was run over by a bus on Columbus Avenue and killed. He was a Texas con artist who stole a black briefcase full of cash from Ali McGraw in The Getaway, and then was elbowed in the face three times by Steve McQueen. I'll never forget his portrayal of a gay guy who was left by Tom Berenger in Looking for Mr. Goodbar, and wailed as Berenger walked away, "Doohhnnn't go!" He was "Burt" to Harry Dean Stanton's "Curt" in Rancho Deluxe. He was one of the goons waiting for Laurence...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 5:32 PM on Sunday, February 19, 2006
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A guy wrote me and
A guy wrote me and said he was "baffled by [my] fascination with the silly Film Snobs book. Leone really is a greater director than Fellini, so what's the problem?" And I answered back, "Leone... endless closeups, closeups, closeups....middle-aged guys with lined, leathery faces staring hard at other guys with lined, leathery faces at the train depot, and somebody finally shoots. He's a stylist, not an artist..not even in the same realm as early '50s to early '60s Fellini."
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 5:27 PM on Sunday, February 19, 2006
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It felt for a while
It felt for a while like I was the only one carrying the ball for Fox Home Video's DVD of Lamont Johnson's The Last American Hero -- now Glenn Erickson (a.k.a., DVD Savant) has stepped up to the plate. "This unpretentious and uncluttered mini-epic about moonshining and stock car racing in the rural south accomplishes an impressive feat," he says. "It's intelligent enough to make viewers forget the idiocy of good-ole-boy action comedies like Smokey and the Bandit and The Dukes of Hazzard." The way I put it was, "There was only one high-velocity '70s redneck film that was any good,...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 7:37 AM on Sunday, February 19, 2006
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Visiting Jett in San Francisco
Visiting Jett in San Francisco today, tomorrow and Tuesday. The Wi-Fi at the Tropicana hotel (south of Market, near the Castro) supposedly works. Here's hoping.
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 7:34 AM on Sunday, February 19, 2006
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I happened to come upon
I happened to come upon this color shot of Lee Harvey Oswald (snapped on 11.23.63) on The Smoking Gun earlier today, and it hit me that every photo I've seen of the guy my entire life has been in black and white...until today. And I now think Oliver Stone should have gotten somebody besides Gary Oldman to play him in JFK.
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 12:28 AM on Sunday, February 19, 2006
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Former Salon critic Charles Taylor
Former Salon critic Charles Taylor (a major film critic who warrants absolute respect, despite the fact that he likes Mission to Mars) and Jeremiah Kipp talk frankly about movies and the political currents that led to Taylor's dismissal from Salon in early '05. The piece appears on Matt Zoller Seitz's The House Next Door blog.
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 12:20 AM on Sunday, February 19, 2006
Saturday, February 18, 2006
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There's an attractive "Great Performers"
There's an attractive "Great Performers" gallery in Sunday's N.Y. Times magazine with photos by Inez van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh Matadin and a quickie intro by Lynn Hirschberg. Neat impressionistic face- and body-painting shots of Charlize Theron, Reese Witherspoon, Vera Farmiga (great in Down to the Bone), etc. But I don't get the cat eyes on George Clooney. It's just not in the same vein as the other shots...not decorative...oddball ...creepy no matter how you slice it.
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 7:29 PM on Saturday, February 18, 2006
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Just can't do those Gurus
Just can't do those Gurus of Gold inputs no more. Many thanks to David Poland for honoring me with an invitation to keep voting, but I'm Guru'd out, man. I've been Heath Ledger-ed, George Clooney-ed, Felicity Huffman-ed, Academy-soaked, Karen Fried-icized, Tony Angelotti-sized, Reese Witherspoon-ed, Philip Seymour Hoffman-ed and Paul Haggis-ed to death. Two weeks and two days and it's over. I love the hoopla and those Oscar contention ads and the parties and all, but I can't be the only one feeling this way.
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 6:44 PM on Saturday, February 18, 2006
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Terrence Rafferty on Robert Altman's
Terrence Rafferty on Robert Altman's finally getting an honorary career achievement award from the Academy on March 5th, and how he "pretty emphatically qualifies as overdue...he has been overdue for 30 years." Of course, Rafferty's New York Times piece zeroes in on Altman's great five-year period when he made M*A*S*H ('70), McCabe & Mrs. Miller ('71), The Long Goodbye (which was barely paid attention to when it opened in '73), Thieves Like Us ('74), California Split ('74) and Nashville ('75), and says they "still look like the core of his achieve- ment...[films] we talk about when we talk about Robert Altman."...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 5:57 PM on Saturday, February 18, 2006
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My favorite all-time Robert Altman
My favorite all-time Robert Altman film is California Split, closely followed by McCabe, The Long Goodbye and The Player. I haven't seen Nashville in eons, and I've seen M*A*S*H* too often. My all-time favorite improvised line in an Altman film (which may have been written by Leigh Brackett for all I know): Elliot Gould's Phillip Marlowe is asking a small-town Mexican official about the alleged death of his amoral, sleazy friend Terry Lennox (Jim Bouton), and the Mexican gentleman refers to Lennox as "the deceased" but it sounds like another English term. And Gould goes, "The diseased...yeah, right." Side note: In the mid...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 5:56 PM on Saturday, February 18, 2006
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I attended a cinematographer's seminar
I attended a cinematographer's seminar at the Newport Beach Film Festival a year or two ago, and asked a question of Vilmos Zsigmond, whose camerawork on Robert Altman's The Long Goodbye was entirely composed of slowly arc-ing tracking shots, always gently floating from right to left (or vice versa) and never sitting still. I told Zsigmond I loved this because it seemed like an apt metaphor for the fluid, always-moving impermanence of life in Los Angeles. And he said, "What you've just said is an intelligent interpretation, but when Altman and I talked about it there was no rationale of that kind. All...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 5:45 PM on Saturday, February 18, 2006
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Hold up on those "Halle
Hold up on those "Halle Berry was a good sport when she got her Hasty Pudding Award in Cambridge" stories. Here's why.
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 4:40 PM on Saturday, February 18, 2006
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Jasmila Zbanic's Grbavica, a drama
Jasmila Zbanic's Grbavica, a drama about a Bosnian mother and daughter struggling to make their way through the aftermath of the Balkan war, won the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival on Saturday. And The Road to Guantanamo co-helmers Michael Winterbottom and and Mat Whitecross shared the Best Director award. Moritz Bleibtreu won a Silver Bear Best Actor award for his role as "a sexually disturbed teacher" in The Elementary Particles. Sandra Hueller was named Best Actress for her acting in Requiem, a fact-based story about a woman "who undergoes an exorcism after suffering a breakdown." Great.
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 4:17 PM on Saturday, February 18, 2006
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Here's that piece about Cuba
Here's that piece about Cuba Gooding coming clean about how and why he made so many crappy movies and let his career slide into the shit-house, written by Lewis Beale and appearing in Sunday's (2.19) New York Times.
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 3:29 PM on Saturday, February 18, 2006
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The March issue of Maxim
The March issue of Maxim magazine has a piece about Hollywood's Great Movie Drunks (or words to that effect). W.C. Fields, Billy Bob Thornton in Bad Santa, Paul Giamatti in Sideways, etc. Maxim doesn't even mention Lee Marvin's Oscar-winning performance as the lushy gunfighter in Cat Ballou. Hilarious shit, except for the fact that Marvin was affected by alcohol in real life and died on the young side (63, I think) partly because of this, which makes his Cat Ballou shenanigans seem a little less amusing. Harry Nilsson's not-fully-conscious decision to drink himself to death for the last 20 or 25 years...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 12:01 PM on Saturday, February 18, 2006
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A DVD of Ridley Scott's
A DVD of Ridley Scott's 190-minute director's cut of Kingdom of Heaven (which I reviewed on January 4th after seeing it the sub-run Laemmle Fairfax in West Hollywood) is coming out on Fox Home Video on May 23. I called it a "considerably better film" than the mainstream theatrical version that opened in May of last year, and said that "stand-up critics ought to review this version for history's sake, for the sake of saluting top-grade filmmaking. This is an obviously improved version of what was a respected film to begin with, and from a major director... attention should be paid....Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 11:24 AM on Saturday, February 18, 2006
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Timur Bekmambetov's Night Watch (Fox
Timur Bekmambetov's Night Watch (Fox Searchlight, opening wide 3.3), a supernatural thriller set in Moscow, opened in Russia in the summer of '04 and across Europe in September '05, and here it is finally opening in Los Angeles...at the funky-ass Nuart in West L.A. That tells me plenty right there. But this quickie trailer (the entire movie speeded up) tells you it's an eyeful, and I like this passgae from Kenneth Turan's review, observing that Bekmambetov "has combined two things that never connected before. He's taken a glossy Hollywood-type fantasy thriller about the battle between supernatural forces of good and evil...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 10:58 AM on Saturday, February 18, 2006
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So those late January rumors
So those late January rumors about Universal honcho Stacey Snider coming to the Paramount lot and replacing Paramount president Gail Berman weren't total hogwash after all. The L.A. Times' Claudia Eller and the Hollywood Reporter's Anne Thompson have reported over the last couple of days that Snider is looking to take a production chief job with DreamWorks on the Paramount lot, but not replace Berman or anyone else on the Paramount team. Given that the rumors were about 40% true, Nicole LaPorte's 2.5.06 Variety story complaining about unchecked net rumors (including the Snider-moving-to-Paramount one) reads a bit more hair-trigger than...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 7:57 AM on Saturday, February 18, 2006
Friday, February 17, 2006
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One more Jack Lechner Oscar
One more Jack Lechner Oscar parody song..."Hey, Bear":
Hey, bear. You with the fur and the claws. I'd like to come and live with you. Despite Alaska's laws.
Hey, bear. Though you could rip me in two. I'll give a silly name to you. And introduce my dame to you.
Though I'm an actor. I haven't worked in some years. Why did I push the world away? I lost a part on Cheers.
When it's hungry, a bear. Will even eat its brother. So if I keep trying to pretend. That you're merely a harmless friend. Chances are I'll...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 5:57 PM on Friday, February 17, 2006
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With the end of the
With the end of the 10-day Berlin Film festival in sight, here's a pretty good sum-up by Variety's Elizabeth Guider: "From Robert Altman's Prairie Home Companion to Michael Winterbottom's Road to Guantanamo, from banquets at the KaiserSaal to the bustle at the Gropius Bau, the Berlinale has proposed something for just about everyone during its 56th annual movie marathon. Whether one came for the culture or the commerce, the politics -- or just the partying -- this Berlinale will likely go down as one of the more vibrant events on the world movie calendar."
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 5:28 PM on Friday, February 17, 2006
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Another key Film Snob statement:
Another key Film Snob statement: "Readers knowledgable about film will notice the conspicuous absence from The Film Snob's Dictionary, apart from passing references, of such titans of foreign cinema as Federico Fellini (8 1/2), Ingmar Bergman (The Seventh Seal), Akira Kurosawa (The Seven Samurai), and Satyajit Ray (the Apu trilogy). The Film Snob may indeed know a fair amount about these filmmakers (Fellini in particular, given that his movies' soundtracks were often composed by Snob cause celebre Nino Rota), but he generally scoffs at them, deeming them to be mere name-drops for bourgeois losers wishing to seem cultured. Watching a Bergman film...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 5:24 PM on Friday, February 17, 2006
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The biggest thing working against
The biggest thing working against Gustavo Santaolalla's Brokeback Mountain score winning the Oscar on 3.5 is nobody being able to quite pronounce his last name. I'm pretty good with Spanish and every time I try it I half-swallow my tongue.
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 4:48 PM on Friday, February 17, 2006
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Halle Berry is obviously capable
Halle Berry is obviously capable of making atrocious choices in movies, but she's also a good sport.
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 4:36 PM on Friday, February 17, 2006
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It's a shame that I
It's a shame that I missed seeing Disney's Lady and the Tramp (1955, and as far as I can recall the first anamorphic feature cartoon ever made) at the El Capitan, but a new two-disc DVD is coming out 2.28. The first DVD was released in the prehistoric analog era of 1999, so this new one will probably have a better transfer.
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 4:24 PM on Friday, February 17, 2006
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It's confusing and tedious to
It's confusing and tedious to try and post one of the "Elsewhere Live" broadcasts where it should be which is why it's been gracious of Jason Heiser to help me out on this, but he's out of touch lately so here's Thursday night's discussion with John Scheinfeld, director of Who is Harry Nilsson (and Why Is Everyone Talking About Him)? plus a riff about the LBJ doc.
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 4:08 PM on Friday, February 17, 2006
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David Kamp and Lawrence Levi's
David Kamp and Lawrence Levi's The Film Snob's Dictionary: An Essential Lexicon of Filmological Knowledge (Broadway) finally hits the stands on 2.21. I was handed a copy last October and I ran a whole column on it then and there because experience has taught me not to wait when your blood is up -- do it now. Read all about it on the Snobsite, which also talks about the Rock Snob book (co-authored by Kamp and Steven Daly). It's in my earlier piece, but this is the essence of the Film Snobs book, towit: "The Film Snob's stance is...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 3:46 PM on Friday, February 17, 2006
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Gavin Hood, director of Tsotsi (Miramax, 2.24), at the Four...Read More
Spark of Goodness
Spark of Goodness
A little over six months ago I wrote that Gavin Hood's Tsotsi had become "the big stand-out at the end of the Toronto Film Festival."
A few weeks later Tsotsi was picked up by Miramax and is playing in theatres starting today (2.24). And it seems safe to say now that it's the most likely winner of the Best Foreign Language Oscar on March 5th...unless a sufficient number of Academy members take leave of their senses and vote for Joyeux Noel.
Gavin Hood, director of Tsotsi (Miramax, 2.24), at the Four...
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 3:05 PM on Friday, February 17, 2006
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I could smell Freedomland (Columbia,
I could smell Freedomland (Columbia, opening today) coming a mile away. The advance word was atrocious, which was no surprise given that Revolution Studios chief Joe Roth directed it. I didn't go to the screening (I watched the Criterion DVD of Shoot the Piano Player instead), but N.Y. Times critic Manohla Dargis did, and she calls it "an early candidate for worst film of the year...an inept, lethally dull drama [featuring] one of the few authentically awful performances of [Julianne Moore's] career." The reviews are 20% positive on Rotten Tomatoes across-the- board and only 13% Cream of the Crop. And if...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 9:43 AM on Friday, February 17, 2006
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Yesterday I suggested a remake
Yesterday I suggested a remake of Robert Bresson's Au Hasard Balthazar, not realizing that one had already been made by the great Jay Chandrasekhar and released last summer by Warner Bros. Here's a review and an excerpt: "Chandresekhar is one of the saints of the cinema, and The Dukes of Hazzard is his most heartbreaking prayer. The film follows the life of a muscle car from birth to death, while all the time living it the dignity of being itself -- a dumb machine, noble in its acceptance of a life over which it has no control. The General Lee is not...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 8:54 AM on Friday, February 17, 2006
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Here's the first right-wing film
Here's the first right-wing film critic attack upon V for Vendetta, appearing on Jason Apuzzo's Liberty Film Festival site. (It's odd that the author doesn't use his own name, going instead by the moniker "the Road Warrior"...what's that about?) One thing I agree with: V is set in a vaguely futuristic England, but "is very much about America here and now." Yes! The diversion is RW's view that the film is "a paranoid, left-wing fever dream of what America is here and now...a psychological study of left-wing projection and paranoia. Needless to say, [it] is everything it accuses the government within the...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 8:21 AM on Friday, February 17, 2006
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Bond franchise producers Michael G.
Bond franchise producers Michael G. Wilson and Barbara Broccoli, widely regarded throughout the film industry as a pair of amiable chumps, tried to get several name actresses to play Daniel Craig's leading lady in the currently filming Casino Royale, but the agents and managers for these actresses counselled against it for one reason or another. (One of them being that they think the Bond franchise is on a downswirl these days.) But now Wilson-Broccoli finally have someone to play Vesper Lynd, and it's Eva Green, last in Ridley Scott's Kingdom of Heaven and before that in Bernardo Bertolucci's The Dreamers. Green is an...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 7:34 AM on Friday, February 17, 2006
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Novelist and screenwriter Larry McMurtry,
Novelist and screenwriter Larry McMurtry, 69, says the core theme of Brokeback Mountain is that "life is not for sissies," which of course means that he thinks Heath Ledger's Ennis del Mar character is one. He's right, of course. The immense sadness that BBM leaves you with at the finale is all about this middle-aged cowboy's realization that he's blown it by failing to make something out of his deep-river feelings for Jake Gyllenhaal's Jack Twist. A Pulitzer Prize winner and BBM co-screenwriter (along with Diana Ossana), McMurtry is an Oscar nominee for Best Adapted Screenplay. He let go with his del...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 7:03 AM on Friday, February 17, 2006
Thursday, February 16, 2006
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Animals aren't just poking through
Animals aren't just poking through as the stars of new films, but are giving killer performances...so to speak. This is almost the view of Pete Hammond, who saw Frank Marshall's Eight Below (Disney, 2.17) at the all-media last Monday. He also showed Eight Below to his UCLA "Sneak Preview" class last week and says "it went through the roof...one woman said it was the best film she'd ever seen at the series." He also says that the Huskies and Malamutes in the film are phenomenally touching, and that they almost seem to show acting chops. I couldn't be bothered to see Eight Below...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 6:07 PM on Thursday, February 16, 2006
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An interactive Oscar ballot that
An interactive Oscar ballot that the New York Times would love you to fill out.
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 5:30 PM on Thursday, February 16, 2006
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I've decided to simultaneously shock
I've decided to simultaneously shock myself and the readership by actually doing an "Elsewhere Live" broadcast when I'm supposed to, which is Thusdays at 5 pm Pacific, 8 pm Eastern. So here goes...the main subect is John Scheinfeld's Who is Harry Nilssn (and Why Is Everyone Talking About Him)?...listen if you've a mind to.
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 4:58 PM on Thursday, February 16, 2006
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The writing has been on
The writing has been on the wall for Harrison Ford's downturn for years. I saw it coming when he turned down the Michael Douglas part in Traffic, and now he's finally burned himself out with audiences because he won't divert from doing the same old well-made but tired formula films like Firewall. Plus he's just looking too grandfatherly to be the older hero type. So it's downshift time and it happens to the best of them. It happened to Redford and Newman. (I think Newman handled it the best of all with his character parts, etc. Redford seems to be somewhere between over...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 2:04 PM on Thursday, February 16, 2006
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The feds obviously suspect that
The feds obviously suspect that Mike Ovitz, the former CAA topper, ex-Disney honcho and failed management-agency chief, hired Anthony Pellicano to use his wiretapping skills to get information about people Ovitz was dealing or negotiating with. This is why Ovitz has been called before a grand jury "to testify about his dealings and conversations with Pellicano, who pleaded not guilty to charges that were unsealed last week in a 110-count indictment," says a New York Times story by David Halbfinger and Allison Hope Weiner. A person who hires someone to do something illegal means Mr. Moneybags is just as guilty and prosecutable...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 12:49 PM on Thursday, February 16, 2006
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Steven Soderbergh's The Good German
Steven Soderbergh's The Good German (Warner Bros., early-mid fall '06) is set in 1945, not 1947...and it's been described by Soderbergh not as a risky romance drama but as "a real murder mystery." (Reader Joshua Flower, responding to the Dakr Horizons plot description I posted yesterday, says it "sounds like a bit of a gloss on The Third Man.") Plus it's been shot in black and white, and that settles it -- I'm in love. Why monochrome? "I'm incorporating archival footage into the movie and there's just no other way to make it match," Soderbergh told Suicide Girls correspondent Daniel Robert...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 9:50 AM on Thursday, February 16, 2006
Wednesday, February 15, 2006
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Two and a half weeks
Two and a half weeks until Oscar night, and the only question is whether George Clooney will beat Paul Giamatti for Best Supporting Actor. It'll be Brokeback Mountain for Best Picture, and Ang Lee for Best Director, Capote's Philip Seymour Hoffman for Best Actor (although it should ideally be a tie between Hoffman and Heath Ledger), Walk the Line's Reese Witherspoon for Best Actress, Cinderella Man's Giamatti and Syriana's Clooney neck and neck, The Constant Gardener Rachel Weisz winning for Best Supporting Actress, Crash's Paul Haggis and Bobby Moresco for Best Original Screenplay, Brokeback Mountain's Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana for Best Adapted...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 6:03 PM on Wednesday, February 15, 2006
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I've never really looked at
I've never really looked at what Steven Soderbergh's The Good German (Warner Bros., early-mid fall '06) actually is (or seems to be), and then along comes Garth Franklin and Dark Horizons with a short profile. It's been directed by Soderbergh from a script by Paul Attanasio (and based on Joseph Kanon's novel), with a cast including George Clooney, Cate Blanchett, Tobey Maguire, Beau Bridges and Jack Thompson. It's a risky romance drama set in the bombed-out ruins of post-WWII Berlin, and it's going to be a modest thing...perhaps an engrossing and well-made modest thing, but modest all the same with everyone wearing...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 5:28 PM on Wednesday, February 15, 2006
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This is almost the best
This is almost the best review I've seen anywhere of Firewall. I don't know who "Jeremy and Clint" are (the site says they've "been selectively reviewing films for a decade"), but I'd like to hear from them about each and every film henceforth. (This strip on Brokeback Mountain is less to my liking, but it makes a couple of fair/astute points.) Seriously...this is good stuff.
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 1:21 PM on Wednesday, February 15, 2006
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The N.Y. Times' David Carr
The N.Y. Times' David Carr (a.k.a., "the Bagger") is sounding alarmed about the unwashed multitudes not turning up in sufficient numbers to see the four Best Picture nominees still in theatres -- Brokeback Mountain, Munich, Good Night, and Good Luck and Capote . The import of this will be low ratings for the Oscar telecast, disappointing ad revenues for ABC and a generally bad impact upon the reputation of the Oscar Awards. Let me say this about that (as John F. Kennedy used to say): Fuck the ratings, fuck ABC's ad revenue worries, fuck the unwashed multitudes for continuing to be...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 12:47 PM on Wednesday, February 15, 2006
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This isn't secret information (it's
This isn't secret information (it's on the IMDB), but a Turkish reader named Nedim Bali is reminding me that Valley of the Wolves: Iraq, the Rambo-ish anti-American action film that's become a huge hit in Turkey, Austria and Germany, began life a TV series (minus the "I" word), and that Sharon Stone and Andy Garcia guest-starred opposite Necati Sasmaz, the star of the film as well as the series, in the final episode. Garcia played a mafia head and Stone played his wife. Bali says he's heard/read they were paid $500,000 each for one day's work. "It's interesting that...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 12:31 PM on Wednesday, February 15, 2006
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Indian film director T. Rajeevnath
Indian film director T. Rajeevnath is today wearing a clown face and a dunce cap because he's reportedly interested in casting Paris Hilton as the star of a new film about Mother Teresa, which he reportedly plans to shoot in English in West Bengal. Accurately or inaccurately, fairly or unfairly, the poor schmuck has been quoted as saying that his "agents in California have contacted Paris Hilton" about this proposal, and that he's interested because he was "impressed when he heard the hotel heiress had refused to strip for Playboy magazine." Rajeevnath has a background as a sane and honorable film...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 11:35 AM on Wednesday, February 15, 2006
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That plot line in Ridley
That plot line in Ridley Scott's '70s-era American Gangster -- i.e, heroin smuggled in soldiers bodybags from Vietnam -- was first seen in a 1985 episode of Miami Vice with Gordon Liddy as the drug dealer. It was called "Back in the World," which first aired on 12.6.85. The director was Don Johnson; the writer was Terry McDonnell. The guest stars were Bob Balaban (Ira Stone), Iman (Dakotah), G. Gordon Liddy (Capt. Real Estate), Patti D'Arbanville (Mrs. Stone), Susan Hatfield (Mrs. Real Estate) and Gary Cox (Harold). Plotline: A journalist that Crockett knew in Vietnam is ready to break a story about 'The...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 10:17 AM on Wednesday, February 15, 2006
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Whoops...should have read this clumsily
Whoops...should have read this clumsily written Borys Kit Hollywood Reporter story more carefully. I linked to it yesterday in a riff about Michael Bay and Friday the 13th, but it's a producing deal, not a directing one. (The end of the fourth graph in the Kit story says that "no director is attached to the project.") But my original thesis that Bay is making a bad career move still holds, since he'll next be directing Transformers: The Movie, a Jerry Bruckheimer-style take on the Amblin' family flicks from the '80s. The man is in trouble. He needs to get away from popcorn...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 9:24 AM on Wednesday, February 15, 2006
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I didn't mention this in
I didn't mention this in the earlier riff [02/14/2006, 1:48 PM] about John Scheinfeld's Who is Harry Nilsson? doc, but I was reminded of it this morning. Not only did Nilsson not write "Everybody's Talkin' At Me", but he also didn't write "Without You". A BBC site says the song was actually the work of British band Badfinger, specifically Pete Ham and Tom Evans. A desperate plea to a departing lover, 'Without You' is lent added poignancy by the knowledge that its writers eventually committed suicide, ground down by dodgy business dealings and the pressures of the music biz. Nilsson's...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 8:28 AM on Wednesday, February 15, 2006
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"Entertainment Weekly hates me. They've
"Entertainment Weekly hates me. They've hated me since they've been a magazine. Fuck 'em...and you can go and tell them that," Bruce Willis said last Sunday (yeah, I know...three days ago is old news) during a press conference for 16 Blocks (Warner Bros., 3.3). Willis was asked why EW hates him. "Because I'm a threat to them. Why does anybody hate anybody? Because they have some beef. Who cares? They can all blow me." I once wrote a News & Notes piece for EW about Willis and various troubles that happened during the shooting of Striking Distance (1993). My sources were impeccable and...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 8:15 AM on Wednesday, February 15, 2006
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Being a celebrity-relationship reporter is
Being a celebrity-relationship reporter is a repellent way to make a living. I never touched it when I worked at People in the mid to late '90s, but there was something faintly odorous wafting out of the offices back then (and this was years before the celeb-chasing magazines turned uniformly icky and vapid in the Bonnie Fuller mode). Nonetheless the willingness of Life & Style to stick its neck out over the "Imminent Death of TomKat" story has a certain head-turning quality. My immediate response was "Already?" If this story is even half-true (and I'm not saying or presuming that it is),...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 7:04 AM on Wednesday, February 15, 2006
Tuesday, February 14, 2006
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Munich peaked when it was
Munich peaked when it was nominated for Best Picture. That was it -- it'll never get any better than that. And as a would-be Oscar winner it's been finished and out of the game for so long that I've forgotten the last time I gave it even a snowballs's chance in hell. I'm sorry, but this David Carr/"Bagger" story reads to me like a big reach...
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 4:21 PM on Tuesday, February 14, 2006
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Russell Crowe, Denzel Washington, Ridley
Russell Crowe, Denzel Washington, Ridley Scott, and heroin smuggled inside the caskets of deceased U.S. servicemen = the all-new American Gangster. The Antoine Fuqua version of this film with Washington and Benicio del Toro was shuttered by Universal production chief Stacey Snider when the budget (over $100 million) appeared to be spiralling out of control. I don't like the title (it sounds sucky and dopey...any movie title using the word "American" sounds tedious and unimaginative), but I want to see it, of course.
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 4:11 PM on Tuesday, February 14, 2006
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Cheers to Paramount Classics chief
Cheers to Paramount Classics chief John Lesher for acquiring Davis Guggenheim's An Inconvenient Truth, which was a big audience hit at Sundance '06. The doc is basically Al Gore's longstanding lecture-and-slide-show about global-warming caughtby cameras. The 5.26 release will coincide with the release of Rodale Books' printed version, also called "An Inconvenient Truth." In a 1.26 Sundance posting I said that An Inconvenient Truth "has given me hope and that everyone should see it. It's strike-a-match time, and this film is a ray of light. I'm starting to think that Gore's entire political career, which culiminated with his run for the...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 3:38 PM on Tuesday, February 14, 2006
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It's not a big deal
It's not a big deal if Michael Medved and other rightie critics are ready to take advance potshots at Steven Soderbergh's Che, a film now being shot about the final frustrating (some would say ignoble) chapter in the life of Ernesto "Che" Guevara, when he was trying to launch a guerilla revolution in Bolivia. That's if the finished film (which will be out later this year) takes what the righties may decide is an overly sympathetic or admiring view of the man, which is obviously a wait-and-see proposition at this stage. For what it's worth, there is truth to...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 2:43 PM on Tuesday, February 14, 2006
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Another good story about Valley
Another good story about Valley of the Wolves -- Iraq, the anti- American action flick that has Turkish audiences cheering as the hero sticks it to the Anglo bad guys. The author is New York Times' Istanbul correspondent Segnem Arsu. The most expensive film ever made in Turkey (costing about $10 million), it's opened so far in Turkey, Austria and Germany, and is breaking box-office records in one or more of these territories. The screenwriter says it wasn't meant to insult Americans, but it's a Rambo-like action story involving Turkish gunmen who seek revenge against American soldiers, so c'mon.
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 1:50 PM on Tuesday, February 14, 2006
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I thought I had my
I thought I had my opinion locked down about John Scheinfeld's Who is Harry Nilsson (and Why Is Everybody Talking About Him?), which I saw the weekend before last at the Santa Barbara Film Festival...but I'm having another one of those turn-of-the- screw experiences. My first reaction was admiration for the film's intelligence and craft mixed with a profound irritation with the way Nilsson ruined his talent and life with incessant boozing, and yet I've thought and thought about the film since and realized what a sad-profound, deep-dish thing it actually is. There's a follow-up screening this Saturday (2.18) at S.B.'s...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 1:48 PM on Tuesday, February 14, 2006
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Over-Analyze This
Over-Analyze This
The close of Oscar season is near enough (two weeks and three days away) that a post-mortem is coming to mind: with all the new Oscar blogs that sprouted up this year (Red Carpet, The Envelope, USA Today's O-Factor, Anne Thompson's Risky- Biz) Oscar-race riffing has been incessant and every wrinkle picked over to the point of total exhaustion, and there's nothing more to say at this stage. Or damn little.
Which is why I'm doing a piece about how dry the well is. At least it's honest and it mirrors the situation back into itself. I'm...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 1:40 PM on Tuesday, February 14, 2006
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This ran yesterday as I
This ran yesterday as I was packing up and leaving Santa Barbara, but since I ran a Chris Penn item when he passed I need to put a cap on it. The primary cause of death was "nonspecific cardiomyopathy [plus] an oversized heart that weighed 700 grams with the effects of multiple medication intake," according to a coroner's statement. Promethazine with codeine "featured predominantly in his death," according to coroner investigator Craig Harvey, who called his passing "an accident." That's b.s., of course. Penn committed slow improvised suicide through overeating and too much booze and too many drugs.
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 10:04 AM on Tuesday, February 14, 2006
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"A lot of the Gail
"A lot of the Gail Berman complaints listed by the woman who wrote to you (see the 'Scent of Toast' story) are bogus. The woman who sent it to you is pissed because all her projects got dropped. This always happens when a new administration comes in although they usually do it more slowly, so the pain is more protracted. I know what it's like to work on something for years and then have it abandoned -- it makes you crazy, the way you feel when a relationship you've invested in has come up empty. You're mad and want to blame someone. I...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 9:56 AM on Tuesday, February 14, 2006
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Whether you're for editorial free
Whether you're for editorial free speech in the form of those Danish cartoons that offended so many European Muslims or against it, some kind of editorial bravery medal ought to go to LABAF for shooting and posting this video (largely footage of a 2.11.06 "manif" in Paris). I mean, in view of the cowardice shown by so many news organizations in reporting about this culture- clash story, with none being willing to show the cartoons that offended so many in the first place. Ater watching it a friend wrote in and said "when it comes to this controversy, all I can say...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 9:48 AM on Tuesday, February 14, 2006
Monday, February 13, 2006
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That Italian director-screenwriter whose name
That Italian director-screenwriter whose name escaped me while typing that photo caption in the story about those Santa Barbara Film Festival panels was Cristina Comencini -- my apologies to her and for forgetting that Giovanna Mezzogiorno, the star of Comencini's new film Don't Tell (Lionsgate, 3.17), won the Best Actress award at the 2005 Venice Film Festival. I'll be seeing the film Thursday evening (or on DVD...haven't yet decided), and after that there's a swanky dinner reception for Comencini and lah-dee-dah. My apologies again.
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 6:07 PM on Monday, February 13, 2006
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An anonymous online petition to
An anonymous online petition to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which so far has been signed by 4,313 people in Israel and abroad, is calling upon the academy to withdraw Hany Abu-Assad's Paradise Now from the list of nominations for Best Foreign Film. The real purpose of the petition, of course, is to tarnish the film's rep among Jewish Academy members so they'll vote for another foreign-language film and thereby lessen the odds of the acclaimed drama winning the Oscar. The petition argues that Paradise Now legitimizes mass murder, and portrays the murderers themselves as victims." Uhm, okay....and disenfranchised...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 10:55 AM on Monday, February 13, 2006
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George Clooney said a day
George Clooney said a day or so ago in Berlin that he doesn't expect to win any Oscars on March 5th. I don't know about that. He's such a good politician and schmoozer and so well liked that he might just take the Best Supporting Actor Oscar for his acting in Syriana...for putting on weight, growing a beard and looking vaguely bewildered and lost, or in other words for not playing a variation of that same guy he's been playing over and over since One Fine Day. The Oscar should go to Cinderella Man's Paul Giamatti, but the momentum is swinging...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 10:42 AM on Monday, February 13, 2006
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So Washington, the third installment
So Washington, the third installment of Lars von Trier's America trilogy, is on "indefinite hold" (is that another term for scuttled because nobody wants to sit through another one of von Trier's talky, preachy, Swedish sound-stage, chalk-on-the-floor dramas after Manderlay?), and he won't be premiering his next film, The Boss Of It All, in Cannes.
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 8:51 AM on Monday, February 13, 2006
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"From the start, Walk the
"From the start, Walk the Line was pegged as a solid, unspectacular film propelled by two dynamite performances. And whaddya know -- the two performers got [Oscar] nods, and that's about it. Now get ready for a month of stories from people in my business about how Crash is gaining momentum with voters because it's about Los Angeles, where most Academy voters live. But don't get suckered in. Brokeback is gonna win. The media is just bored." -- Newsweek's Devin Gordon trying to alleviate his own boredom in the current issue.
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 8:16 AM on Monday, February 13, 2006
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Bottom line: if John Turturro's
Bottom line: if John Turturro's Romance and Cigarettes worked a little better it wouldn't be "collecting dust at Sony Pictures, which inherited the movie as part of April's Sony-MGM transaction," as this John Horn story in the L.A. Times reports. I saw it at the Toronto Film Festival and liked the opening number sung by James Gandolfini and the madman chutzpah displayed by Christopher Walken, but the karaoke thing started tio feel more and more underwhelming and it didn't seem to rock 'n' roll and kick it out with the right kind of primal energy. Diverting but not delicious.
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 7:55 AM on Monday, February 13, 2006
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So-so responses may be looming
So-so responses may be looming for Robert Altman's A Prairie Home Companion...if Peter Brunette's Screen Daily review out of the Berlin Film Festival is anything to go by. He calls it "a reasonably entertaining film [that] nevertheless falls quite short of the achievement of such Altman ensemble masterpieces as Nashville, M*A*S*H and Short Cuts." And yet he calls Altman's homage to America's favorite radio show "a largely spirited affair, despite a few sagging moments. Paradoxically, it may play better in Europe and other territories than in North America, where its central plot of a soulless corporation overtaking a beloved, if superannuated, cultural...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 7:19 AM on Monday, February 13, 2006
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I don't want to see
I don't want to see this movie because I don't want to spend any prolonged time with the balding, red-haired, dorky-looking guy in the photo. If I saw this guy coming towards me on a sidewalk ...forget it.
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 7:15 AM on Monday, February 13, 2006
Sunday, February 12, 2006
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A guy named "El Mayimbe"
A guy named "El Mayimbe" has posted a script review on Latino Review of the currently shooting Casino Royale with Daniel Craig as James Bond. Observation/opinion #1: The script is a contemporary origin story (i.e., doesn't take place during the cold war in the early 1950s) and is "really cool." Observation/ opinion #2: "The first four pages before the main title sequence shows us how Bond got his double O ranking -- his first two kills of MI6 Section Chief Dryden (for selling secrets) and Dryden's contact in Pakistan." Observation/opinion #3: "The carpet- beater scene [from the original Ian Fleming novel]...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 7:49 PM on Sunday, February 12, 2006
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Vice-President Dick Cheney having shot
Vice-President Dick Cheney having shot a guy he was hunting with isn't funny. The victim, a 78 year-old lawyer named Harry Whittington, could have been seriously hurt and thank fortune he's in stable condition, etc. What's funny to me (and you know this is going to be Letterman/Leno material on Monday evening) is the New York Times report that Cheney "fired his shotgun without realizing that Mr. Whittington had approached him from behind, spraying his fellow hunter on his right side, on his cheek, neck and chest." I once mistakenly shot one of my own guys in the arm with a...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 6:37 PM on Sunday, February 12, 2006
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Heres' a good Phoebe Eaton
Heres' a good Phoebe Eaton story in New York magazine about Harvey and Bob Weinstein and their new chapter with the Weinstein Co., etc.
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 6:08 PM on Sunday, February 12, 2006
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Show & Tell
Scent of Toast
I haven't done any serious calling around about embattled Paramount Pictures president Gail Berman, but I received a letter this morning [Sunday, 2.12] from a woman who seems very knowledgable and connected to people in the creative community, and what she says about Berman and her situation (as well as the perceptions and management skills of Paramount chairman Brad Grey) is fairly damning.
The letter-writer feels that two big stories about Berman so far -- Laura Holson's piece in the N.Y. Times (which was mainly about Grey but touched on Berman) and Anne Thompson's recent "Risky Business" column...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 3:49 PM on Sunday, February 12, 2006
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I wish like hell I
I wish like hell I was in New York City or Boston right now and trudging through the snow and taking pictures. I remember a fantabulous Manhattan blizzard in '81 or '82, and walking across Columbus Circle with the snow piled so high half my legs sank through as I pushed my way through it.
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 12:20 PM on Sunday, February 12, 2006
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More smart-ass Crash commentary from
More smart-ass Crash commentary from McSweeney's...mildly funny.
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 12:12 PM on Sunday, February 12, 2006
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The Santa Barbara Film Festival
The Santa Barbara Film Festival awards were revealed late this morning, and the winners are as follows: American Spirit Award: Christopher Jaymes' In Memory of My Father, "an unfeigned plunge in to second-generation Hollywood royalty"; Gold Vision Award: Radu Mihaileanu's Live and Become; Best International Feature Award: Gavin Hood's Tsotsi; Nueva Vision Award for Best Spanish/Latin American Film: Manuel Martin Cuenca's Malas Temporadas; and Best Documentary Feature: Pippa Scott's King Leopold's Ghost, about the history and legacy of Belgium's King Leopold II and his country's plundering of the Congo in the 1880s. I'm bypassing the remainder of the awards, but you can find...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 11:55 AM on Sunday, February 12, 2006
Saturday, February 11, 2006
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According to Anne Thompson's latest
According to Anne Thompson's latest Hollywood Reporter/"Risky Business" column, the thing that got Paramount president Gail Berman "into trouble" was the fact that "she's a strong forthright woman accustomed to wielding considerable power. She is not the sort of person who hides her intelligence, defers to men, or uses feminine wiles to soften her image. Disgruntled people who don't like being told how to do their business by a big-screen neophyte complained. And spread rumors. Said one marketing executive at another studio, 'Agents hate her guts,' adding, 'She's not winning friends and influencing people.'" I don't know Berman but I kind of...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 10:00 AM on Saturday, February 11, 2006
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The shit hitting the Anthony
The shit hitting the Anthony Pellicano fan has been propelled by attorneys for former Hollywood journalist-reporter Anita Busch and flung onto Michael Ovitz, the former CAA bigwig who did a hari kiri meltdown a couple of years ago with that "gay mafia" remark. A 2.11 story by New York Times reporters David Halbfinger and Allison Hope Weiner says that "lawyers for Busch, a reporter who was threatened in 2002 -- kicking off a three-year investigation of the private investigator Anthony Pellicano -- confirmed on Friday that they had subpoenaed Michael Ovitz, the former talent agent, manager, and Walt Disney Company president, as...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 9:44 AM on Saturday, February 11, 2006
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I'm late to the party
I'm late to the party (again), but I also tried repeatedly to play the Paul Walker virtual cunnilingus Running Scared online thing, and nothing happened. The player is supposed to pretend he's Paul Walker going down on his wife, the point being to make her come. It looks like someone at New Line marketing may have deactivated it (the entire Scared site seems to be dead -- there were no active links as of 9:30 am Saturday morning), but apparently the game was up and running earlier this week. I wrote Wayne Kramer, the director-writer of the Terry Gillam-esque, Hieronymous Bosch-like...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 9:18 AM on Saturday, February 11, 2006
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There's an excellent Peter Biskind
There's an excellent Peter Biskind piece in the new Vanity Fair about Warren Beatty's long and difficult effort to make Reds (1981), his Oscar-winning epic about journalist and romantic revolutionary John Reed. (The cover tease reads, "What did Warren Beatty do to make Jack Nicholson cry?" A Beatty pull-quote reads, "I told Jack I needed someone to play [Eugene] O'Neill, but it had to be someone who could convincingly take this woman from me." A Diane Keaton pull quote: "I don't think we were much of a couple by the end of the movie.") The piece is an excerpt from Biskind's Beatty...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 8:27 AM on Saturday, February 11, 2006
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A National Public Radio piece
A National Public Radio piece on the Brokeback Mountain trailer spoof and others like it. The funniest Brokeback ad was on Leno the other night. I'd describe it but it wouldn't be the same.
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 8:04 AM on Saturday, February 11, 2006
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Friday, 2.10, 7:50 pm. The
Friday, 2.10, 7:50 pm. The Texas ladies and I needed directions to a Crash party just starting up in the hills, so we pulled into the Liquor Locker on Sunset and we noticed this blond bearded guy coming out of the store: Philip Seymour Hoffman. "Philly? Jeffrey Wells. Journalist...friend of Bennett Miller?" Hey, smile, handshake. "We're just down tonight from Santa Barbara, where you'll be tomorrow, right?" He's receiving the Riviera Award at the Arlington tonight (2.11) with Leonard Maltin hosting along with the usual montage of film clips. Hoffman had come to the store for a pack of smokes (I think) and...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 7:18 AM on Saturday, February 11, 2006
Friday, February 10, 2006
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MSNBC's Erik Lundegaard has a
MSNBC's Erik Lundegaard has a pretty good piece here about the best screen kisses, but unless I read it too fast he left out a whopper: That late-in-the-second-act moment in Hustle & Flow when Terrence Howard walks back into the house and plants a real passionate one on Tarij P. Henson. A great kiss because it's not about down-on-the-floor passion as much as Howard's D.J. charatcrer having finally recognized the love and the loyalty he'd been getting all along from Henson's "Shug." Which, of course, makes it very hot.
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 3:13 PM on Friday, February 10, 2006
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"Interesting complaint about using World
"Interesting complaint about using World Trade Center as the title of Oliver Stone's 9.11 film," a very smart industry guy who knows a lot stuff wrote a few minutes ago. "Here a a couple of thoughts to add to the mix. Maybe he should've called it Wall Street II. Or, more seriously, made a simple edit which would make the title less plodding: World Trade. That makes it sound like an action picture, and yet it resonates. There was indeed a worldwide tradeoff that day." Seriously...I think this is a great title.
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 2:54 PM on Friday, February 10, 2006
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Hollywood-based reader Dixon Steele is
Hollywood-based reader Dixon Steele is saying that closet homophobia regarding Brokeback Mountain is not a rumor. "I had dinner last weekend with my uncle, who is a senior level executive for one of the networks," he writes. "We both see a lot of movies and talk about them at our occasional get-togethers. I was surprised when he told me he hadn't seen BBM yet. Although he's your typical mostly-liberal thinking person (post-middle-aged), he represents the typical Academy voter. And I know from our past talks he's slightly homophobic. And this was confirmed when he told me he had no interest in seeing the...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 12:23 PM on Friday, February 10, 2006
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Oh, yeah...I was going to
Oh, yeah...I was going to say something about Firewall, the new Harrison Ford thriller that opens today. Directed by Richard Loncraine, it's a reasonably well-made programmer. Not boring or horrendous, and it moves along and does the job. Ford (a.k.a., "Uncle Festus") is very good (as usual) at the non-visual stuff...at making you share the tension that his good-guy character is going through as he figures how to stick it to the bad guys who are holding his family hostage. There are about 18 movies that Firewall reminds you of -- The Desperate Hours (both versions), Hostage (the Bruce Willis film), Air Force...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 11:47 AM on Friday, February 10, 2006
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Embarassment Redux: "Often there are
Embarassment Redux: "Often there are good movies that win, but it's the movies that they beat which says it all," says reader Mark Smith. "My personal hell is Dances With Wolves over Goodfellas in 1990. You tell me which movie has become a timeless classic and which has been forgotten about. The grandfucker of them all was in 1976 when Rocky beat Network, Taxi Driver and All the President's Men ." C'mon, Mark...the Oscar always goes to the Best Picture contender that summons the strongest (i.e., weepiest) emotional response. You know it, I know it...par for the course.
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 9:14 AM on Friday, February 10, 2006
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That explanation from a "distribution
That explanation from a "distribution insider" in yesterday's (2.9) Variety story about Tuesday's massive firings at Paramount due to the DreamWorks merger (109 out of nearly 129 employees -- including "almost all senior execs [and] virtually all of former distrib president Wayne Lewellen's staff") is fascinating because of the obvious parallels in male-lion behavior. ""They didn't just get rid of high-level people," the distribution insider told Variety's Ben Fritz and Chris Gardner. "Clearly, they didn't want anybody from the old regime." A nature website I've found says that "a male lion doesn't tend to think in term of his species...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 8:50 AM on Friday, February 10, 2006
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New York Press critic and
New York Press critic and blogger Matt Zoller Seitz defending that grotesque Munich sex scene that was intercut with Munich airport shoot-out footage.
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 8:24 AM on Friday, February 10, 2006
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Reader Andy Smith is adding
Reader Andy Smith is adding Cimarron (1931) to the list of Best Picture Oscar Embarassments. "Most people have forgotten it but it took the prize in 1931, beating out the likes of The Front Page, Public Enemy and City Lights," says Smith. "Seems to have won primarily due to its scope and general 'bigness' (i.e., 'must be a great...look how much it cost to make!')"
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 8:17 AM on Friday, February 10, 2006
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More Best Picture Oscar Embarassments,
More Best Picture Oscar Embarassments, submitted by reader Gabriel Neeb: (a) Mel Gibson's Braveheart (let's call this one a post-Passion of the Christ reassessment); (b) How Green Was My Valley (it beat out the political hot-potato Citizen Kane and the legendary The Maltese Falcon, which was seen in '41 as a hardboiled genre piece and therefore not toney enough for a gold statuette); (c) 1940's Rebecca (a strong piece, but this is the Hitchcock film the Academy went for because...hmmm, let me guess...because producer David O. Selznick was out there twisting arms and calling in the muscle and invoking favors?); (d)...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 7:50 AM on Friday, February 10, 2006
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I missed this one when
I missed this one when it first went up on 2.3.06: Michael Moore is asking readers to send him their health-care horror stories so he can use some of them in his new doc Sicko, which he's currently researching and shooting. "How would you like to be in my next movie?," he begins. "Have you ever found yourself getting ready to file for bankruptcy because you can't pay your kid's hospital bill, and then you say to yourself, 'Boy, I sure would like to be in Michael Moore's health care movie!'? Or, after being turned down for the third time by your...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 7:40 AM on Friday, February 10, 2006
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Last Monday's remark from Tony
Last Monday's remark from Tony Curtis [go south about 12 items] about not having seen Brokeback Mountain and that he probably won't between now and balloting time has led me to re-read Nikki Finke's Feb. 2 L.A. Weekly column and re-consider that she might have been on to something. It began with her saying that "this year's dirty little secret is the anecdotal evidence pouring in to me about hetero members being unwilling to screen Brokeback Mountain. For a community that takes pride in progressive values, it's shameful that Hollywood's homophobia may be on a par with Pat Robertson's. Despite the...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 7:31 AM on Friday, February 10, 2006
Thursday, February 9, 2006
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The biggest-selling Oscar book that
The biggest-selling Oscar book that will never be written because it can't be: Academy Award Vote Totals. Oscar know-it-all and Maxim critic Pete Hammond says he's long wanted to write this but the Academy never reveals the numbers and they supposedly trash-can them after seven years so forget it. If the totals were known and published, the book would never stop selling. If there are any retired Price Waterhouse guys out there who wrote down the totals from years past and kept copies and want to talk about enhancing their savings account by getting into some Mark Felt parking-garage action, get in touch.
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 5:23 PM on Thursday, February 9, 2006
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The biggest Best Picture embarassment
The biggest Best Picture embarassment wins of all time? I think it's a three-way tie between The Greatest Show on Earth, Around the World in 80 Days and Driving Miss Daisy, with Oliver! and Chicago being the first runners-up. Which others...??
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 5:12 PM on Thursday, February 9, 2006
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I can run links to
I can run links to photos of Jack Black in Nacho Libre also. It's the new film from Napoleon Dynamite's Jared Hess and Paramount Pictures, due in early June.
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 4:58 PM on Thursday, February 9, 2006
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I walked right into this
I walked right into this one, but some low-life stole my clothes out of a dryer in a low-rent laundromat on Haley Street yesterday evening while I was back at the Santa Barbara Hotel. A loss of roughly $175, give or take, and nobody's fault but mine.
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 4:54 PM on Thursday, February 9, 2006
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Walk the Line director James
Walk the Line director James Mangold was supposed to attend the Santa Barbara Film Festival today and do a chit-chat at the Lobero, but he had to cancel due to preparation for a pilot in three weeks time and being in the throes of casting. It was always a long shot to begin with, apparently. Too bad...
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 12:42 PM on Thursday, February 9, 2006
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That late '50s noir-whodunit formerly
That late '50s noir-whodunit formerly known as Truth, Justice and American Way, about the death of the TV-series Superman guy George Reeves (Ben Affleck) due to a gunshot wound in the head, has been retitled Hollywoodland, according to the IMDB. A 1.26 report by "Stax" in IGN Film Force said that Allen Coulter-directed film, which will be distribbed by Focus Features (even though it was finished a good while ago and still doesn't have release date on its IMDB page), had to surrender the Truth, Justice title because Warner Bros., the producer of the Superman movies (including Bryan Singer's bewbie...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 11:56 AM on Thursday, February 9, 2006
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What's the worst (i.e., most
What's the worst (i.e., most irritating sounding) movie title ever? The Chicago Tribune's Mark Caro is asking on his "Pop Machine" blog.
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 11:53 AM on Thursday, February 9, 2006
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Keep your eyes peeled for
Keep your eyes peeled for a forthcoming N.Y. Times Lewis Beale story on Cuba Gooding, Jr., and how he's trying to put his career back together. Word on the street is that Gooding is being extremely frank with anyone of a serious bent who wants to know exactly how he screwed things up. I'll tell you how he screwed things up. Snow Dogs and Boat Trip is how.
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 11:28 AM on Thursday, February 9, 2006
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David Carr, the N.Y. Times
David Carr, the N.Y. Times "Bagger" blogger, says Paramount Picture's calorically-challenged president Gail Berman (I'm sorry but c'mon, this is a distinctive characteristic...you can't say it isn't) may be toast after all, and that Endeavor's Ari Emanuel may be coming in to take up Berman's slack. Carr is calling Paramount topper Brad Grey's defense of Berman in that 2.6 Laura Holson Times piece "remarkably wan," and saying that "two people" he's spoken to have "suggested that Emanuel will be brought in to help run the place in Ms. Berman's stead." Strange and prejudiced and as un-p.c. as this may sound, I...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 10:33 AM on Thursday, February 9, 2006
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Everyone's heard by now about
Everyone's heard by now about Valley of the Wolves Iraq, the Turkish anti-American film that shows American soldiers in Iraq "crashing a wedding and pumping a little boy full of lead in front of his mother," and "killing dozens of innocent people with random machine gun fire, shooting the groom in the head, and dragging those left alive to Abu Ghraib prison...where a Jewish doctor cuts out their organs, which he sells to rich people in New York, London and Tel Aviv," according to a Feb. 2 Associated Press story by Benjamin Harvey. Wolves, essentially a Turkish variation on a mid...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 10:06 AM on Thursday, February 9, 2006
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Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter
Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter about an encounter he had with Capote star Philip Seymour Hoffman at the magazine's pre-Golden Globes party at the Sunset Tower (i.e., the old Argyle): "Hoffman...is a terribly serious young man, and in an ill-fated attempt to lighten the moment, I told him that I too do a pretty mean Truman Capote. While he stood there, I did my own impersonation, including the high-pitched, fey, lisping voice and the waving of a crooked finger while I adjusted my eyeglasses. He gave me a pissed-off look and just walked away."
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 9:56 AM on Thursday, February 9, 2006
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A good Mark Lisanti/Defamer slash
A good Mark Lisanti/Defamer slash about Teri Hatcher's see- through outfit at Wednesday night's Grammy Awards: 'We did a few twirls around to make sure you weren't seeing anything you weren't supposed to be seeing,' Hatcher told reporters. Unfortunately, the thing you really 'weren’Äôt supposed to be seeing' -- an aging, nighttime soap star clawing at the spotlight in an outfit that says, 'Hey, everyone! Look at me! I'm in my underwear! Isn't that outrageous?!' -- was still clearly visible to the naked eye."
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 9:51 AM on Thursday, February 9, 2006
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I missed this 2.5 "Page
I missed this 2.5 "Page Six" item about Tony Curtis dissing Brokeback Mountain. The remarks came from a recent interview Curtis did with Fox News critic Bill McCuddy. Curtis's views -- he hasn't seen Brokeback and probably won't, "[it's] not as important as we make it... it's nothing unique," and "Howard Hughes and John Wayne wouldn't like it" -- suggest that Curtis, 80, is no longer thinking like the sharp cat he used to be. He can dislike Brokeback all he wants, but refusing to see it and invoking Wayne and Hughes is way of saying he prefers the sanctity of nostalgia...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 8:48 AM on Thursday, February 9, 2006
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The New York Post's "Page
The New York Post's "Page Six" team has written that Man About Town star Ben Affleck took some affable jabs from director "Mike Binger" -- try Mike Binder, guys -- at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival the other night. Binder took Affleck to task for not attending the film's Tuesday night premiere. "Fuck Ben Affleck for not being here," the Post quoted "Binger" as saying. I don't remember that one (I was in the 18th row) but Binder did say that Affleck's performance is as good as it is in Man About Town "because I edited his performance very carefully...of...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 7:30 AM on Thursday, February 9, 2006
Wednesday, February 8, 2006
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Just wrote a piece about
Just wrote a piece about how Mike Binder's Man About Town, which screened at Santa Barbara's Arlington theatre Tuesday night, played cooler and funnier than I remember after sitting alone in a living room and watching an unfinished version of it on DVD two or three months ago. I'm a proponent of the late Peter Ustinov's idea that comedy and tragedy should always be mixed together, alogn with Christopher Fry's observation that "in tragedy every moment is eternity; in comedy, eternity is a moment." I guess this makes me a sucker on some level for Binder's tragi-comic sense of humor, but to my...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 12:59 PM on Wednesday, February 8, 2006
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Sofia Coppola's Marie Antoinette (Columbia,
Sofia Coppola's Marie Antoinette (Columbia, 10.13) won't be treading in the footsteps of Stanley Kubrick's Barry Lyndon or Andrzej Wajda's Danton, if the trailer is a half-honest indicator. Emphasizing the notion that Coppola's film will be a "stylized" take on Antoinette's life, the trailer is scored with a song by New Order called "Age of Consent." Does this mean the whole of Antoinette is going to be scored like A Knight's Tale and basically be a piece of historical fluff aimed at the women of taste, education and breeding who read Cosmopolitan? I can feel loathing building for this thing already....Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 10:43 AM on Wednesday, February 8, 2006
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The middle-aged machismo clock has
The middle-aged machismo clock has struck twelve for Harrison Ford, 63. I'm sorry to say this, but you can tell in the trailer that Ford has gotten too old to be playing that same late 40ish-early 50ish guy -- older but studly and physically trim -- he's been in film after film since Clear and Present Danger. He looks his age and then some in Firewall (Warner Bros., 2.10), and you just don't believe that a guy with a military-style haircut with white sidewalls and a kind of imperceptibly bent-over walk who basically looks like Uncle Festus from Bakersfield would have...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 9:45 AM on Wednesday, February 8, 2006
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The second of its kind
The second of its kind to be acquired by Paramount Classics, White Planet is an animals-struggling-to survive-in-a-barren-white- wilderness movie. Just because it sounds like a Penguins wannabe doc doesn't mean it necessarily is. We all know life is rarely a day at the beach, and here are two films -- White Planet and The Call of the North -- reiterating this emphatically and at the same time stressing the importance of good parenting.
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 9:27 AM on Wednesday, February 8, 2006
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This 2.7 New York Times
This 2.7 New York Times story about detective Anthony Pellicano's latest difficulties with the law (i.e., prosecutors have hit him with a 110-count indictment accusing Pellicano of racketeering and conspiracy, wiretapping, identity theft, witness tampering, and destruction of evidence) says he "masterminded a sprawling wiretapping ring that helped his clients gain an advantage in disputes with opponents including actors, reporters and talent managers." Uhm, yeah, I know...my phone was tapped by Pellicano (or one of his guys) in the summer of 1993 not long after my Last Action Hero dustup. I don't know who hired him to do this, but it was...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 7:24 AM on Wednesday, February 8, 2006
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Another clever guerilla trailer for
Another clever guerilla trailer for an '80s movie in a new context, in the vein of that joke trailer for The Shining that everyone went nuts over last year.
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 7:08 AM on Wednesday, February 8, 2006
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Putting aside the curious matter
Putting aside the curious matter of James Cameron's Battle Angel, which Cameron said last September would be rolling by early '06 but which he didn't even briefly mention during an on-stage interview in Santa Barbara the night before last (Monday, 1.6), it's been revealed in a Business Week piece that Cameron is working on a screenplay called Project 880, which he describes as a piece of "completely crazy, balls-out sci-fi." If it gets made, Cameron intends it to be a video experience first and a movie second. The article said it would be a "unique interactive experience" that "will be preceded...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 6:52 AM on Wednesday, February 8, 2006
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Grizzly Man director Werner Herzog
Grizzly Man director Werner Herzog seems to have a knack for encountering (or is it attracting?) a certain odd chaotic energy in Los Angeles. First he came across Joaquin Pheonix in his rolled-over car and helped him get out of the car and get to his feet, only to disappear into the night. Then last week (i.e., apparently within the last few days) he was shot in the lower abdomen with an air rifle pellet while doing a video interview with a BBC Two's "Culture Show" host Mark Kermode. Here's Kermode's video piece. First you see the shooting happen with Herzog flinching...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 6:04 AM on Wednesday, February 8, 2006
Tuesday, February 7, 2006
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The new Hollywood issue of
The new Hollywood issue of Vanity Fair is on the stands and the cover, shot by fashion guru Tom Ford, features a buck-naked Keira Knightley and Scarlett Johansson posing with Ford himself. An MSNBC news story says that Johansson's pear-shaped buttocks are fully viewable in the cover's fold-out portion. Angelina Jolie is reportedly also bare-assed in the issue, posing in a bathtub. Here's a B-roll video of the photo shoot, which happened Nov. 11 in Manhattan.
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 11:30 AM on Tuesday, February 7, 2006
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Anthony Breznican's 2.6 piece in
Anthony Breznican's 2.6 piece in USA Today says that Kevin Smith's Clerks II, which will hit theatres in the fall, "is so audaciously raunchy -- one scene is sure to challenge the squeamishness of even the most ardent gross-out comedy fan -- that Smith says the film may ultimately make its debut unrated, even if that restricts its availability at some theaters." He quotes Smith as saying that "in terms of the edginess of the humor, I don't think we've ever gone this far before. People who are really critical of us and dismiss us for making (dirty-joke) pictures: They're right, they're...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 9:54 AM on Tuesday, February 7, 2006
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I wrote a column last
I wrote a column last July complaining about Fox Home Video having failed to put out a DVD of Lamont Johnson's near-great, largely unsung The Last American Hero, a moonshine-smuggling and race-car movie with Jeff Bridges, out on DVD. And now, almost seven months later, Fox Home Video has put it out on DVD. Pauline Kael loved this film, and Johnson (whom I called last summer) is alive and well and with a lot of stories to tell, so of course, naturally, FHV has put out a bare-bones DVD without any kind of making-of doc or a commentary track from...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 9:06 AM on Tuesday, February 7, 2006
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I've been a Crash fan
I've been a Crash fan all along, but I was impressed and taken aback, even, at how incisively New York Times critic Manohla Dargis, writing in a reader q & a column, has explained why the Academy loves this film as much as they do. "First, Los Angeles, where most of Academy members live, is a profoundly segregated city," she writes, "so any movie that makes it seem like its white, black, Asian and Latino inhabitants are constantly tripping over one another has appeal. If nothing else it makes Los Angeles seem as cosmopolitan as, well, New York or at least the...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 9:03 AM on Tuesday, February 7, 2006
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Here's another Dargis riff (from
Here's another Dargis riff (from the same column) that got to me, this time about why she likes Heath Ledger in Brokeback Mountain: "I've almost always liked Ledger, but I didn't think he had anything going on as an actor until Monster's Ball. But while he was amazing for the 10 seconds he was in that film, I wasn't prepared for Brokeback, where he creates a world of pain with a tight mouth and a body so terribly self-contained it's a wonder he can wrap his arms around another person. But here's the thing -- and this is the part that's hard...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 8:54 AM on Tuesday, February 7, 2006
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Two days ago (on Sunday,
Two days ago (on Sunday, 2.5), Variety posted a Nicole LaPorte piece that went after internet news and gossip sites (she named Defamer, David Poland's Movie City News, MediaBistro.com's "FishBowlLA" and Zap2It.com) running unconfirmed, un-fact-checked, apparently untrue scuttlebutt about two alleged developments -- (a) Universal's Stacey Snider looking to bail on her job and take a top post at Paramount, with Par's president Gail Berman getting whacked to make room for her, and (b) ICM and Endeavor looking to merge. Poland's response has been to note that LaPorte's story "fails to report the many times that Movie City News has scooped Variety...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 7:55 AM on Tuesday, February 7, 2006
Monday, February 6, 2006
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Gong Show
Gong Show
If you go to a movie this weekend chances are you'll run into the poster for Oliver Stone's World Trade Center (Paramount, due in late summer or early fall) hanging in the lobby.
And if you're at all like me, you may experience a slight involuntary twitching when you stand there and take it in. Not out of disdain for the visual concept (which is okay), but that godforsaken title. The wretched sound of it, I mean.
World Trade Center just keeps needling me. I've tried to get used to it, but that generically...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 4:29 PM on Monday, February 6, 2006
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Since taking over Paramount Pictures
Since taking over Paramount Pictures last year, Brad Grey has cemented a reputation as the Maximilien Robespierre of studio chiefs -- a guy who's a lot better at chopping off heads and creating an atmosphere of terror than bringing about the kind of inspired changes that might lead to the bolstering of Paramount's stock through the making of really superb films. The whispered verdict around town is that Grey is (I need to put this delicately) (a) a lightweight , (b) out of his depth, and (c) not a man of commanding insight, vision or wisdom as far as the basic building blocks...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 11:47 AM on Monday, February 6, 2006
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I had a couch-jumping epiphany
I had a couch-jumping epiphany while listening to Robert Towne expound last Friday evening at Santa Barbara's Victoria theatre. I'm referring to the media meltdown that Towne's friend (and Ask the Dust producer) Tom Cruise went through last year, which led to the term "couch-jumping" or "couch-jumper" being added to the dictionary after Cruise's burst of athletic jubilance on Oprah Winfrey's show last summer. Listening to Towne led to thoughts of Cruise, and it suddenly hit me that we're all seized at one time or another by a couch-jumper mentality (exuber- antly manic, a hyper-edgy attitude). We all go there from time to...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 11:19 AM on Monday, February 6, 2006
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There's no such thing as
There's no such thing as a good time or a bad time. There is no love or hate, no happiness or sadness...no short or tall, black or white, hunger or gluttony, sweet or sour. The Bhagavad Gita teaches that all changes and transitions are temporary illusions, and whether it's heads or tails it's always the same cosmic coin. Only suckers feel happy when their ship comes in and their bellies are full, and lament when their milk is spilt and their lovers have left.
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 11:08 AM on Monday, February 6, 2006
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It took me two hours
It took me two hours to write a piece this morning about a Harry Nilsson documentary that I saw Saturday night. Then the browser crashed because of a too-large Quicktime video file I tried to watch, and I hadn't saved the article so I lost the whole thing and I'm livid, on top of which I haven't kept up with the WIRED items over the last couple of days, I have a screening to catch in 90 minutes, there are three or four invoices that need to be sent in and there's a phoner I have to do with Rupert Murray, director of...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 10:42 AM on Monday, February 6, 2006
Saturday, February 4, 2006
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This is desperate-sounding chitter-chat on
This is desperate-sounding chitter-chat on one level, but on another level it's kind of fun. It would be startling, of course, if Crash were to take the Best Picture Oscar away from Brokeback Mountain. It won't happen, but it would be fascinating if it did. I would survive and so would Ang Lee and James Schamus, and the world would not be that different a place the morning after...but c'mon. We're all pretty sure what's going to happen. I think.
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 12:29 PM on Saturday, February 4, 2006
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I missed mentioning this yesterday,
I missed mentioning this yesterday, but there's a second showing of Werner Herzog's Grizzly Man -- in my view the finest and without question most critically honored documentary of 2005 -- on the Discovery Channel this evening (Saturday, 2.4) at 8 pm.
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 12:25 PM on Saturday, February 4, 2006
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Carlos Reygadas' Battle in Heaven,
Carlos Reygadas' Battle in Heaven, a follow-up feature to his widely acclaimed Japon, is getting most of its attention because of a depiction of a dull schlumpy guy being orally serviced at the beginning and end of the film. It's a blowjob that seems rote and passionless and is certainly boring to watch (it isn't remotely in the league of the Brown Bunny finale). The provider is a pretty and sophisticated young girl of 17 or 18 from a wel-to-do family, and the receiver is a homely middle-aged lump with inexpressive eyes and a gross pot belly. And he's not reacting in...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 12:05 PM on Saturday, February 4, 2006
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For me, the gruesome story
For me, the gruesome story of the Black Dahlia murder peaked when I watched a fascinating passage in a Vikram Jayanti doc called James Ellroy's Feast of Death, a study of the life of the fabled crime writer. The passage showed L.A. Times copy editor Larry Harnisch explain why be believes the would-be actress was killed by a middle-aged surgeon named Walter Bayley. It's a very convincing theory, and chilling to think about. Does anyone else find it suspicious that Pat Broeske's N.Y. Times story doesn't hint or even ask whether Brian DePalma's upcoming film about the murder tale, simply...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 11:47 AM on Saturday, February 4, 2006
Friday, February 3, 2006
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I'm way late on this
I'm way late on this one with all the Santa Barbara activity, but that story from last Monday or Tuesday about Grizzly Man direc- tor Werner Herzog coming to the aid of Joaquin Pheonix after his car rolled over in the Hollywood hills is curiously haunting. Not because Herzog tapped on Pheonix's upside-down car window and did the decent thing by trying to help...that's standard. I'm referring to the part about Pheonix being out of the car and standing up and clearly okay, and Herzog suddenly gone. No hanging around or talking to the cops, but into the night like an angel, like...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 1:35 PM on Friday, February 3, 2006
383 comments
Face It Down
Love Is Strange
Mozart and the Whale, which screened yesterday afternoon at the Santa Barbara Film Festival, is a Rain Man-type love story with a jumpy heart. Jumpy as in child- like, energetic, anxious.
A romanticized, tidied-up version of a complicated real-life love story, it's about a youngish couple (Josh Hartnett, Radha Mitchell) with autism, or more particularly Asperger's Syndrome. And this, viewing-wise, is nervy and provocative in more ways than one.
It's not calming or swoony like other love stories because the lovers are always in a fairly hyper and unsettled state, which...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 12:23 PM on Friday, February 3, 2006
Thursday, February 2, 2006
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Alex Gibney, the director-writer of
Alex Gibney, the director-writer of the Oscar-nominated documentary Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, was handed the Writers Guild award for documentary screenplay last night (i.e, Wednesday, 2.1). Gibney's triumph happened two days after the start of the criminal trial in Houston of former Enron Corp. executives and Kenneth Lay and Jeffrey Skillingn. At issue is whether Lay and Skilling were the spinners and bad guys behind accounting scheme that crashed Enron, once the seventh-largest company in the country, in December 2001. Watch Gibney's film and tell me your verdict
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 11:21 AM on Thursday, February 2, 2006
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Another possible inclusion in Oscar
Another possible inclusion in Oscar Balloon '06, for perform- ances if nothing else: Andrew Dominik's The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (Warner Bros., late '06). Based on a reputedly strong novel by Ron Hansen, with period- sounding dialogue said to make Missouri (and the characters) in the 1870s seem very strange and exotic. It's apparently the first film Dominik has done since Chopper, which harbored Eric Bana's breakthrough role. As tabloid readers know, it stars Brad Pitt but also Sam Shepard (as Frank James), Sam Rockwell, Mary-Louise Parker, Zooey Deshanel and Michael Parks. Kinda sounds like Son of the...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 10:49 AM on Thursday, February 2, 2006
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Still another addition to the
Still another addition to the Oscar Balloon '06 list has been sent in, this time by reader Nate Meyer: Kenneth Lonergan's second film Margaret (Fox Searchlight), which seems to contain echoes of Atom Egoyan's The Sweet Hereafter since it's about a 17 year-old Manhattan high-school girl (Anna Paquin) on a major guilt trip because she believes she played a role in a bus accident that took a woman's life. Pacquin's costars are Matt Damon, Mark Ruffalo, Matthew Broderick and Jean Reno. Will this come out in '06 or...?
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 10:29 AM on Thursday, February 2, 2006
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All Quentin Tarantino and Robert
All Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez want to do is wallow in comfort. To them it's all about hangin' back in the parlors of grindhouse, guns, babes and blood...in style and pizazz and dime-store machismo. Neither wants to reach deep inside and create something half-original about love and desire and struggle on the planet earth. They obviously don't have the temperament to do this, but I'm starting to formulate an idea that they don't even have the nerve. The latest wallow is going to be funded by the Weinstein Co., with both Tarantino and Rodriguez planning to direct a...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 10:04 AM on Thursday, February 2, 2006
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Oscar Balloon '06 addition/suggestion from
Oscar Balloon '06 addition/suggestion from reader Joseph Jones: Little Children, director Todd Field's follow-up to his Oscar-nominated In the Bedroom, starring Kate Winslet, Patrick Wilson and Jennifer Connelly. Based on Tom Perrotta's novel, it's about young marrieds whose lives intersect on the playgrounds, town pools and streets of their small community "in surprising and potentially dangerous ways." (Reader Josh Capps informs that "dangerous ways" actually means "adultery, internet porn, and the presence of a paroled child molester") New Line will distribute. There's no IMDB date listed, but it sounds to me like a September-October-November slot.
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 8:59 AM on Thursday, February 2, 2006
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Here's another '06 contender: Milos
Here's another '06 contender: Milos Forman's Goya's Ghosts, a Saul Zaentz production with Javier Bardem and the luminous Natalie Portman in a double role. Synopsis: "In 1792 Spain, the revolution has sent neighboring France into turmoil and the Spanish church decides to restore order by bringing back the dreaded Inquisition. A key orchestrator is the enigmatic and cunning priest Lorenzo (Bardem), a man who seeks power above all. Lorenzo's friend is Francisco Goya (Stellan Skarsgaard), Spain's most famous artist and portraitist to kings and queens. When his beautiful model Ines (Portman) is unjustly imprisoned and tortured by the Inquisition their friendship is put...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 8:49 AM on Thursday, February 2, 2006
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I have to drive up
I have to drive up to Santa Barbara today around noon and get myself set up at Fess Parker's Doubletree hotel before ambling over to a gathering across from the Arlington theatre (an hour or so before the 8 pm debut showing of Robert Towne's Ask the Dust) for festival director Roger Durling, so the column will be down for a few hours...
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 8:35 AM on Thursday, February 2, 2006
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"The Bagger" (i.e., N.Y. Times
"The Bagger" (i.e., N.Y. Times Oscar columnist David Carr) has a pretty good rundown about who's got the edge (and why, and what might overtake them) in the various Oscar categories. But he's wrong when he says that Brokeback Mountain "has no mono- poly on social relevance. If anything, Crash has a more contemp- orary lilt on a more chronic, widespread issue." What...roadside racism? That doesn't hold a candle to what Brokeback is funda- mentally about, which, as I tried explaining in mid-December, "is the terrible price of letting a good thing go... the tragedy of a person feeling love...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 8:09 AM on Thursday, February 2, 2006
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I read Henry Bean and
I read Henry Bean and Leora Barish's script of Basic Instinct 2 four or five years ago...and although it's nicely-written hack job it's still an empty programmer because it's about absolutely nothing. Nothing, that is, except the task of mounting a sequel to a hit 1992 film. Sharon Stone was 33 when she made the original -- she was 47 when the Michael Caton-Jones follow-up was filmed last year. And somehow the idea of Michael Douglas's San Francisco cop character (i.e., "Shooter") having been ice-picked sometime after the close of the '92 film and before the start of '06 version...well, I didn't like...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 7:45 AM on Thursday, February 2, 2006
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I spoke to Liam Neeson
I spoke to Liam Neeson twice last summer at a couple of post-movie-premiere parties, and he said that the plan was for Steven Spielberg's Abraham Lincoln movie, in which he'll play the title role, to start shooting sometime around March '06. Forget it -- Spielberg's spokesperson Marvin Levy told me yesterday the Lincoln project (which will be based in part upon Doris Kearns Goodwin's recently published book about Lincoln) won't roll anytime soon and is basically up in the air.
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 7:29 AM on Thursday, February 2, 2006
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N.Y. Post critic Lou Lumenick
N.Y. Post critic Lou Lumenick says that "an era has ended with the closing of Loews State, the last movie theater operating in Times Square, once the nation's premier moviegoing district." I've been in NYC dozens of times over the last 20 years (I lived there from '78 to '83) and I didn't go to this low-rent basement-level theatre once...not once. Lumenick says that the State -- a modest four-screen multiplex tucked into a sub-basement of the Virgin Megastore on Broadway at 45th Street -- was the final holdout in an area that once housed more than a dozen movie palaces along...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 7:19 AM on Thursday, February 2, 2006
Wednesday, February 1, 2006
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Here's an L.A. Times story
Here's an L.A. Times story by Mary McNamara about expected low ratings for the March 5th Oscar telecast because average movieogers (i.e., mostly youths) haven't yet paid to see most of the Best Picture nominees in sufficiently large numbers: "There is no Titanic this year...there is no Lord of the Rings," Oscar producer Gil Cates observes. "The creative community has chosen to honor films that are different from those the rest of the country is seeing." By "the rest of the country" he means, for the most part, the marginally educated under-25 red-staters...giggly girls, teenaged guys travelling in packs, people of ethnic...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 2:09 PM on Wednesday, February 1, 2006
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Just a reminder for those
Just a reminder for those who don't scroll down that Oscar Balloon '06 is up and running, and that any and all suggestons as far as additions, deletions and whatnot from all four corners of the globe are welcome. Our journey of a thousand miles and 365 days starts here...
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 1:38 PM on Wednesday, February 1, 2006
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The New Bond flick is
The New Bond flick is looking like a wipeout before it gets rolling. Despite filming having begun on the Daniel Craig-starring, Paul Haggis-authored Casino Royale in Prague a few days ago, the producers still haven't signed anyone to play the Icily Sophisticated, Cold-Hearted Villain in Perfect Physical Shape as well the Tough, Spirited, Independent-Minded, Fated-to-Sexually- Submit Bond Girl. "They're talking to three to four [women] right now," Haggis recently told a reporter. "Every week I read there's a new Bond girl, and I call them and they say, no, you idiot." Let's just spit it out so we don't have to step...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 12:54 PM on Wednesday, February 1, 2006
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Sony Pictures Classics' Capote is
Sony Pictures Classics' Capote is moving into 1,500 screens this Friday (2.3) to try and make a little moolah out of those five Oscar nominations, including Best Picture and Best Actor for Philip Seymour Hoffman. Originally released on 9.30.05, the highest number of screens for the upscale biopic was 348 (as of 1.20), resulting in earnings of $15 million so far. "There was a difficulty in getting a people to know who Truman Capote was," SPC co-honcho Tom Bernard recently told Variety reporter Gabriel Snyder, "but [the Oscar nominations have] put us in the mainstream of American attention." Did everyone read that? There...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 12:19 PM on Wednesday, February 1, 2006
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Here's Chicago Tribune critic Mark
Here's Chicago Tribune critic Mark Caro's new blog, called Pop Machine.
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 12:17 PM on Wednesday, February 1, 2006
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Hold on a sec: I've
Hold on a sec: I've just figured a way for the fourth Indiana Jones movie, which has been in and out of development since the early '90s, to work despite the Harrison Ford aging problem. One glance at Ford in that Firewall one-sheet and your first thought is how old and grandfatherly he seems. How do you write a dashing, thrilling Indy 4 adventure flick when the star is going to be 64 in July and looks every day of it? Conventional solution: turn him into Sean Connery in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade...cast him as the dad/mentor figure opposite some young...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 11:51 AM on Wednesday, February 1, 2006
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I watched Flight 93 Monday
I watched Flight 93 Monday night on A&E, and so did N.Y. Times guy David Carr (a.k.a., "the Bagger"), and so did 5.9 million other good people, giving the A&E channel its largest audience ever since launching in 1984. Decently made but a bit too emotionally emphatic (i.e., too many weeping women), this made-for-cable version of Paul Greengrass's upcoming feature of the same title (due in April from Universal) reached 2.9 million adults (aged 25 to 54....what happens when you turn 55?...do you roll over and die?), 2.7 million folks in the 18 to 49 age range, and 1 million...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 11:29 AM on Wednesday, February 1, 2006
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The Santa Barbara Film Festival
The Santa Barbara Film Festival -- orchestrated, massaged, grooved and fine-tuned by the tireless Roger Durling -- kicks off tomorrow night (Thursday, 2.2) with a gala showing of Robert Towne's Ask the Dust (Paramount Classics, 3.10), with Towne and star Salma Hayek attending. (Towne will do a "conversation with" forum at Victoria Hall on Friday, 2.3, at 5:30 pm.) The films are always well-chosen but for me the SBFF is mainly about faces, seminars & panels, parties, blondes and photo-ops. Other creatives visiting Santa Barbara over the next ten days include George Clooney (recipient of the Modern Master Award on Friday evening,...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 10:51 AM on Wednesday, February 1, 2006