I’ve completely updated the Oscar Balloon, and I pledge to not let it fall behind ever again. Sometime today (Monday, 8.1), Oscar Balloon will be moving to the right-hand side of the column and out of the bottom of the column space. On top of this portions of it (i.e, one category at a time) will be excerpted in the news ticker. There will also be a tiny link under the HE logo that’ll take you right there.
Day: July 31, 2005
Let’s face it, let’s be
Let’s face it, let’s be really honest — there’s a lot of us out there who want to hear the audio track of that videotape that was recording when that grizzly bear killed and ate Timothy Treadwell and his girlfriend, Amie Huguenard, in October 2003 up in the wilds of Alaska. This ghastly event isn’t heard in Werner Herzog’s Grizzly Man (Lions Gate, 8.12), a doc about Treadwell’s devotion to communing with grizzlies, but we do see Herzog listening to it and grimacing and then telling a woman from Treadwell’s family that the tape should be burned. I respect Herzog’s decision not to include it (he said “I didn’t want to make a snuff film”) but c’mon…this is a movie about a guy who loved hanging with grizzlies in their natural habitat, but was paradoxically killed by a bear because the bear got ornery and decided, “Hey, why not?” Herzog wasn’t wrong but I don’t believe in shielding people’s eyes and ears from the realities of life. If you’re making a film about Richard Nixon’s impeachment, you show the House Judiciary Committee voting to impeach. If you’re going to make a film about a weird guy who got eaten by a bear, make a film about a weird guy who got eaten by a bear. A guy has written in a discussion group that “it would be terribly insensitive to tack an audio recording of a human being getting eaten alive at the end of the film just for shock value,” but it wouldn’t be for shock value. It would be what happened — the reality is the reality. Here’s an IMDB discussion
of the incident and some of the particulars on the tape.
Wait a minute…Hustle & Flow
Wait a minute…Hustle & Flow dropped 50% in its second weekend for a $4 million haul? The big hit of Sundance…one of the very best films of the year so far with a vibe that leaves you in a very spiritual place went down 50%? Don’t misunderstand — Craig Brewer’s film will turn out to be one of Paramount Classics’ biggest hits (figure $25 million domestic when all is said and done) but Hustle should have dropped 25% or 30% this weekend, at most. A 50% drop means people out there are telling their friends, “Yeah, sorta…but not altogether.” And they’re dead wrong…they’re lazy and short-sighted. I’m not an ivory-tower elitist, I spent my childhood in Union County, New Jersey, and I’m now staying in a non-affluent middle-class area of Brooklyn. So I understand the regular-guy thing and am speaking with a certain authority when I say that the people failed this weekend — they let Hustle & Flow down, let themselves down, let the specialness-of-movies down. I haven’t felt this upset and dismayed since the November ’04 Presidential election when it was clear that younger voters had stayed away from the polls in sufficient numbers to allow Goerge W. Bush a second term.
Downfall’s Oliver Hirschbiegel doing Body
Downfall‘s Oliver Hirschbiegel doing Body Snatchers (or Invasion of…), a remake of a ’70s Phil Kaufman film that was a remake of a landmark ’50s Don Siegel film that was also reworked by Abel Ferrara in ’93….really terrible idea! Even with (or do I mean particularly with?) Nicole Kidman in whatever the lead role will amount to this time. Shooting is apparently set to begin in October.