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)
Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 6:17 PM on Tuesday, February 28, 2006
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
"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
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
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
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...
Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 4:37 PM on Tuesday, February 28, 2006
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
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...
Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 2:57 PM on Tuesday, February 28, 2006
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...
Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 2:20 PM on Tuesday, February 28, 2006
"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...
Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 1:23 PM on Tuesday, February 28, 2006
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
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
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...Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 5:56 PM on Monday, February 27, 2006
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
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...
Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 3:11 PM on Monday, February 27, 2006
"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
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
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...
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 1:56 PM on Monday, February 27, 2006
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...
Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 1:38 PM on Monday, February 27, 2006
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...
Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 1:07 PM on Monday, February 27, 2006
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
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...
Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 12:12 PM on Monday, February 27, 2006
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
Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 11:37 AM on Monday, February 27, 2006
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...
Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 11:13 AM on Monday, February 27, 2006
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...
Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 9:29 AM on Monday, February 27, 2006
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...
Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 12:32 AM on Monday, February 27, 2006
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...
Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 3:07 PM on Sunday, February 26, 2006
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
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...
Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 1:22 PM on Sunday, February 26, 2006
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...
Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 11:43 AM on Sunday, February 26, 2006
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
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
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
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 YorkerRead More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 8:44 AM on Sunday, February 26, 2006
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
...
Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 7:50 AM on Sunday, February 26, 2006
"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...
Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 8:57 PM on Saturday, February 25, 2006
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
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...
Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 12:55 PM on Saturday, February 25, 2006
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...
Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 11:33 AM on Saturday, February 25, 2006
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...
Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 11:07 AM on Saturday, February 25, 2006
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 10:28 AM on Saturday, February 25, 2006
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 ScaredRead More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 9:29 AM on Saturday, February 25, 2006
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...
Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 12:08 AM on Saturday, February 25, 2006
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
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
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 7:17 PM on Friday, February 24, 2006
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
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...
Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 4:01 PM on Friday, February 24, 2006
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
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...
Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 2:42 PM on Friday, February 24, 2006
"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...
Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 1:35 PM on Friday, February 24, 2006
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...
Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 11:23 AM on Friday, February 24, 2006
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...
Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 10:44 AM on Friday, February 24, 2006
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
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...
Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 9:42 AM on Friday, February 24, 2006
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
"
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...
Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 11:02 PM on Thursday, February 23, 2006
"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
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,
...
Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 4:14 PM on Thursday, February 23, 2006
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...
Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 2:59 PM on Thursday, February 23, 2006
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
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
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...
Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 12:43 PM on Thursday, February 23, 2006
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 GyllenhaalRead More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 9:41 AM on Thursday, February 23, 2006
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 9:22 AM on Thursday, February 23, 2006
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...
Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 9:06 AM on Thursday, February 23, 2006
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...
Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 9:04 AM on Thursday, February 23, 2006
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 ArabiaRead More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 8:52 AM on Thursday, February 23, 2006
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
"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
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...
Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 11:18 AM on Wednesday, February 22, 2006
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?...
Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 10:56 AM on Wednesday, February 22, 2006
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...
Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 8:50 AM on Wednesday, February 22, 2006
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...
Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 8:10 AM on Wednesday, February 22, 2006
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 7:47 AM on Wednesday, February 22, 2006
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
TarnationRead More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 7:31 AM on Wednesday, February 22, 2006
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...
Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 7:16 AM on Wednesday, February 22, 2006
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
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 5:05 PM on Tuesday, February 21, 2006
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 2:19 PM on Tuesday, February 21, 2006
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...
Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 8:22 AM on Tuesday, February 21, 2006
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
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
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...
Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 7:37 AM on Tuesday, February 21, 2006
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
...
Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 2:27 PM on Monday, February 20, 2006
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...
Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 9:34 AM on Monday, February 20, 2006
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...
Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 8:09 AM on Monday, February 20, 2006
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...
Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 10:54 PM on Sunday, February 19, 2006
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...
Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 5:32 PM on Sunday, February 19, 2006
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
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...
Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 7:37 AM on Sunday, February 19, 2006
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
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
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
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
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
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 "
...
Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 5:57 PM on Saturday, February 18, 2006
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...
Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 5:56 PM on Saturday, February 18, 2006
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...
Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 5:45 PM on Saturday, February 18, 2006
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
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...
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 4:17 PM on Saturday, February 18, 2006
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
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...
Read More
posted by Jeffrey Wells at 12:01 PM on Saturday, February 18, 2006
A DVD of Ridley Scott's 190-minute director's cut of
Kingdom of Heaven (which I