Day: June 21, 2005

The new trailer for Fernando Meirellles’ The Constant Gardener (Focus Features, 8.26) is up and rolling. Download it and make of it what you will, but also consider the view of a reader who recently saw the entire film: “Gardener is a tad more conventional and mainstream than Meirelles’ City of God, which I was a huge fan of, but it combines thriller elements, a love story and searing reportage of everyday catastrophes besetting Africa…it’s by far the strongest Le Carre adaptation in feature form ever. There are just so many good things about it that it’s hard to know where to start. And while this film is nobody’s notion of an easy sell (the big problem is the unfortunate title), The Constant Gardener‘s uncompromising and indisputable emotional power should give it a shot at a lot of recognition and buzz. You want to see this one ASAP.”

Those attending the War of the Worlds all-media showing this Monday (6.27) will be obliged to miss the televised debut of the two -and-a-half-minute trailer for Peter Jackson’s King Kong. But there’s an alternate option: an announcement on the official King Kong site says that “Volkswagen, the exclusive automotive promotional partner of King Kong, has been granted the exclusive online debut window for the teaser trailer. Beginning at 8:44 PM ET (15 minutes prior to the NBC Universal primetime roadblock), the teaser trailer may be viewed exclusively on the Volkswagen website (www.volkswagen.com). This Volkswagen online exclusive will continue for 48 hours.”

“You gotta find a good woman. Not too smart, not too dumb. Not too old, not too young. One that can cook and clean.” — Saddam Hussein’s advice to an unmarried 20-something American guard in Baghdad, according to a news report.

It won’t be enough for that new David Spade Comedy Central satire show (“The Showbiz Show”) to goof on moronic Access Hollywood and Entertainment Tonight-style coverage of Hollywood and celebrity news. These shows parody themselves. Spade is going to have to really get down and be mean…if you catch my drift. If the show were on right now, for instance, he would have to really talk about what’s going on with everyone talking about but not really talking about the Tom Cruise meltdown. If Spade just does his usual “nyah-nyah..I’m a funny smart-ass” thing without taking it to the next level, the show won’t make it.

I’ve thought and thought about it over the last 24 hours, and I still don’t get Sharon Waxman’s Tom Laughlin-wanting-to-do-a-Billy Jack remake story. It seemed to mainly be about Waxman (or maybe Times editors Michael Ceipley or Jodi Kantor) being a fan, etc. I couldn’t figure any other reason why it ran. Does Laughlin seriously expect people to relate to a 73 year-old barefoot Billy Jack setting things straight about…what?..the religous right, nuclear power, the Iraqi War and the proposing of a third-party candidate? Tom Laughlin and Billy Jack nostalgia are waaaay past the identification or recollection abilities of the general ticket-buying demographic. It would be one thing if Laughlin was planning on hiring a younger guy to play the Native American character, but there was no indication of that in the story….so I don’t get it. What did I miss?

My people-rebelling-against-flaunted-celebrity-behavior theory (by way of Nathaniel West’s Day of the Locust) seems to be gaining validity. The London Independent‘s Andre Gumbel has, in a just-posted article, half-rationalized and come close to applauding last weekend’s squirt-gun attack (click on video here) upon Tom Cruise by a guy from a Channel Four news team. “Though [Cruise] kept his cool, the stunt will have been heartily applauded by those who are beginning to tire of Cruise’s endless self-promotion,” Gumbel wrote. “The production of Tom Cruise: The Movie is in full swing and the response, at least so far, appears to be a resounding thumbs-down.”

A sincerely rendered approval-slash-redemption piece appeared in last Sunday’s New York Times, with Charles Isherwood lauding the talents of Elizabeth Berkley and her work in Scott Elliott’s revival of David Rabe’s Hurlyburly. “I hereby spread the word that [Berkley] is pretty darn good,” he wrote. “You may have already heard that virtually everyone is terrific in this much-acclaimed production. That Ms. Berkley holds her own among this skilled company of scene- stealers (i.e., Ethan Hawke, Josh Hamilton, Wallace Shawn) is a testament to how much her talent has grown since her appearance in [a certain] monumentally bad movie. As Bobbie, a ‘balloon dancer’ who gets more than she bargained for on a joyride with a frustrated actor, the statuesque Ms. Berkley is like a big, battered Barbie doll, a bruised good-time girl who, contrary to expectations, turns out to have a more reliable moral compass than almost anyone else onstage. Ms. Berkley handles the more baroque stretches of Mr. Rabe’s dialogue with aplomb, and strikes a deeply poignant note in the play’s second act, when Bobbie interrupts a drug-induced, nihilistic reverie from Mr. Hawke’s character with a morsel of humanistic truth: Life may be a big, empty lie, but that’s no excuse for being mean to your friends.”