How’s this for a Howard Hughes triple bill at the American Cinematheque somewhere down the road? Open with Martin Scorsese’s The Aviator, follow up with Edward Dmytryk’s The Carpetbaggers (1964), featuring the always-icy George Peppard as a cold, misogynistic movie mogul-slash-industrialist, a character based on Hughes, and conclude the evening with Jonathan Demme’s Melvin and Howard (1980), mostly about a middle-class American schlub (Paul LeMat) but featuring an inspired Jason Robards cameo perf as a rickety, weather-beaten, half-looney Hughes.
Day: February 15, 2005
The mentality of those 77
The mentality of those 77 year-olds who’ve bristled at Oscar Awards emcee Chris Rock’s comments about the show (“It’s a fashion show” that’s “mostly for gay people”) and who are muttering that he’s “not suitable for the job” (according to Hollywood Reporter columnist Martin Grove)…this harumph-y attitude is precisely why the Oscar Awards are seen as going downhill and increasingly irrelevant. Especially now that the specifics of Rock’s comments in the Entertainment Weekly interview (offered here as a link to a Movie City News transcript) make it clear that what Rock actually said (without the quotes taken out of context) are perfectly valid and have been articulated before by others, including George C. Scott 30-something years ago when he called the Oscar show “a meat parade.”
A non-scientific Newsweek/MSNBC poll has
A non-scientific Newsweek/MSNBC poll has asked readers which super-expensive popcorn movie they’d most like to see in 2005, and right now (Tuesday, 2.15, 9:37 am) the most eagerly awaited (favored by 32% of voters) is George Lucas’s Star Wars III: Revenge of the Sith (20th Century Fox, 5.19). Mike Newell’s Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (WB, 11.18) is the second most anticipated with 18%, Tim Burton’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (WB, 7.15) is third with 11%, and Steven Spielberg’s War of the Worlds (Paramount, 6.29) is fourth with 10%. Peter Jackson’s King Kong (Universal, 12.14) got 4%, but it’s early yet. Adam Sandler’s The Longest Yard (Paramount, 5.27) gathered a 3% rating…hmmmm.