Month: October 2005

The decision by Nicolas Cage and wife Alice Kim Cage to name their just-born son Kal-el is…how can I best put this?…deranged. Can you imagine growing up knowing you’ve been named after Superman (i.e., his Kryptonian name)? This ranks with Frank Zappa naming his daughter Moon Unit and that dirty mangy dog in the Johnny Cash song naming his son “Sue.”

I’ve seen a demo of Sony’s Blu-ray high-definition DVD process, and I’ve asked two or three people about the differences between it and Toshiba’s HD-DVD system, and it comes down to this — Blu-ray is a more expensive process but it’s more high-end…more digitally au courant and forward-looking…and HD-DVD, which I haven’t seen, is more of a backward-designed system but it’s cheaper to work with. There are one or two other twists and wrinkles, but that’s what it basically comes down to, trust me. And you won’t find any trade reports anywhere that just say that. The latest development in the DVD high-def techno-clash is that Paramount Home Entertainment has decided to support both the Blu-ray and the HD-DVD system. Scott Hettrick’s Variety report says that “several execs in each camp believe the Paramount announce- ment to publish in both formats, which is the direction Warner has been leaning for the past week or two (with a similar announcement expected this week), is simply a temporary face-saving strategy and that ultimately all studios will shift completely over to Blu-ray by launch time [in the spring of ’06].”

There’s a DVD series called “Sundance Festival Favorites,” and the distributor is the curiously-named Genius Products, Inc. Curious because one of the titles, which is due for release on 10.25, is Jill Spreicher’s Clockwatchers(’98), a comedy about office angst and girl empowerment that costarred Toni Collette, Parker Posey and Lisa Kudrow. Curious because Clockwatchers wasn’t even a slight favorite at the 1997 Sundance Film Festival…it died there. The word was so negative that it took another year and a half for the film to find its way into theatres. It opened on 5.15.98.

A lot of journos (including columnist Emanuel Levy) have written pieces about the just-passed 50th anniversary of James Dean’s death, which happened around sundown on 9.30.55. But how many have driven up to the actual collision spot in Cholame, California, and…you know, gotten out of the car and stood there and closed their eyes and smelled the air and let the lingering vibe of that tragedy (and believe me, you can still feel it) sink in? I’m just asking.

I slipped into a 9:45 pm showing of Capote Saturday night (10.1) at the Arclight and there were only two or three unoccupied seats. Bennett Miller’s film averaged a bit more than $25,000 per screen with a haul of $303,000 in just twelve situations. A good start, but a film like this needs to pace itself. Then again, how can any semi-intelligent movie fan go through the next four or five months without seeing Phillip Seymour Hoffman’s knock-down Oscar-calibre lead performance? There’s no ducking it.

Here’s a nicely written Roman Polanski interview piece by the Guardian‘s Sue Summers. I’m now into catching Oliver Twist, which I didn’t feel like making an effort to see during the Toronto Film Festival. Polanski doesn’t like to sit down with journalists. I tried to speak with him in Paris in ’02 when the Oscar chances of The Pianist were looking uncertain, but he woudn’t do it. Something tells me if Summers had been a fat balding male, the sit-down might not have happened. And it’s a tiny bit curious that Summers pretty much blows the privacy thing with this graph: “A week later I am sitting opposite Polanski in L’avenue, a trendy restaurant situated among the Guccis and Chloes of smart Avenue Montaigne, just next door to where he lives with his third wife, the 39-year-old French actress Emmanuelle Seigner, and their two children, Morgane, 12 and Elvis, 7.”

Nobody at Warner Bros. told me about any screenings of Carroll Ballard’s Duma, which has been called an excellent & moving kids-and-nature movie by Scott Foundas and Roger Ebert, and it’s now hitting me I have to pay to see it at a theatre this weekend ….great. If I don’t go it’ll probably be yanked and then I’ll have to wait four months for the DVD.

Reactions to Susan Stroman’s The Producers appear to be sharply divided at the very least, and that’s not just another way of saying the reactions are “mixed.” The movie has a lot of fans. A guy who attended last Thursday’s research screening wrote that “even though my entire group (myself plus three friends, all of whom see a fair number of flicks) despised The Producers, there were those in the audience who were clearly having a good time. They were clapping after every song. But for me, all the zip and brains of Mel Brooks’ original 1968 movie have been sucked out in favor of sight gags, ugly cliches and awful song-and-dance sequences. Susan Stroman, the director, proves herself completely incapable of creating a movie that doesn’t look like she dropped a camera in the center aisle at the St. James and went to sleep.”

It’s not lead actress Zhang Ziyi but supporting actress Gong Li who’s the sensation in Memoirs of a Geisha, or so I’ve been told…

Hmmm….a moderately interesting piece by the N.Y. Times‘ Sharon Waxman about a recent visit to the set of Paul Weitz’s American Dreamz, a $19 million political satire that will stick it to Team Bush. My first thought was that the film could date very quickly, depending on what happens in the news…but maybe not. Dennis Quaid is playing a “clueless, if good-hearted head of state named Staton…Marcia Gay Harden plays his Laura-like wife who calls him ‘Poopie’…Willem Dafoe, a senior presidential adviser of the Karl Rove kind, gives the president ‘happy pills’ and fits him with an earpiece…Hugh Grant stars as the gratuitously nasty host of a popular television singing contest called ‘American Dreamz.’ And a novice actor, Sam Golzari, plays Omer, a suicide bomber with a penchant for American show tunes.” Weitz tells Waxman, “If people don’t have anything to say about [this film], it will be really disappointing.” Get it out soon, fellas!

The L.A. Times‘ Claudia Eller and John Horn are now saying that studio execs are admitting that last summer’s slump was mostly about cruddy movies, and probably wasn’t a harbinger of a permanent downturn in theatrical revenues. The reason for this sudden candor is that Hollywood has just experienced four punchy weeks at the box-office (grosses 17% higher than what they were last year from Labor Day to last weekend) due to the popularity of The Exorcism of Emily Rose, Transporter 2, Flightplan and Tim Burton’s Corpse Bride. To which I say again — it’s the admissions, stupid. The number of people going out to movies has been steadily declining for the last few years. It’s great to have had a robust four weeks, but it now costs $10.75 to buy a ticket at the Grove…hello?