The New York Post‘s “Page Six” team has written that Man About Town star Ben Affleck took some affable jabs from director “Mike Binger” — try Mike Binder, guys — at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival the other night. Binder took Affleck to task for not attending the film’s Tuesday night premiere. “Fuck Ben Affleck for not being here,” the Post quoted “Binger” as saying. I don’t remember that one (I was in the 18th row) but Binder did say that Affleck’s performance is as good as it is in Man About Town “because I edited his performance very carefully…of course, if he’d shown up, I’d be kissing his ass.” The S.B. festival staffers were a little miffed because they’d booked Binder and his film with expectations that the cast — Affleck, Rebecca Romijn, John Cleese, Jerry O’Connell, Geena Gershon, Adam Gold- berg — would show up, and nobody did. I think that comes under the heading of “bad manners”, guys. You make a film, it preems in or near Los Angeles, and you’re obliged as professionals and as considerate human beings to support it, and to give it some attention with the media…period. Nobody knows what kept Affleck away from Santa Barbara (maybe it was unavoidable), but it was suggested at the Man after-party that maybe the new baby he and Jennifer Garner are taking care of had something to do with it. Take it from me: if anyone ever uses “baby” as a reason for not showing up at an event, don’t believe them. I’ve taken care of two babies, I know what it’s like and how demanding it is, and if you have something important to do for business/career reasons, you can always get away and do that…trust me.
Just wrote a piece about how Mike Binder‘s Man About Town, which screened at Santa Barbara’s Arlington theatre Tuesday night, played cooler and funnier than I remember after sitting alone in a living room and watching an unfinished version of it on DVD two or three months ago. I’m a proponent of the late Peter Ustinov’s idea that comedy and tragedy should always be mixed together, alogn with Christopher Fry’s observation that “in tragedy every moment is eternity; in comedy, eternity is a moment.” I guess this makes me a sucker on some level for Binder’s tragi-comic sense of humor, but to my surprise the audience went for it even more than I and laughed at all the right places. I heard only one diss at the after-party. (Three people who were there last night told me they think it’s better than Binder’s The Upside of Anger.) I loved the unreal anarchic way that Binder throws grief at his lead character, a Beverly Hills literary agent played by Ben Affleck. Distributors may have issues about this and that and it may run into some trouble with a portion of the critics, but last night told me that Man About Town definitely plays with a crowd. (The well-heeled Santa Barbara kind, at least.) In any event, I had the piece written with photos and everything, but I wrote it on Movable Type and didn’t save it as I was going along, and the damn thing crashed on me five minutes ago.
Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette (Columbia, 10.13) won’t be treading in the footsteps of Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon or Andrzej Wajda’s Danton, if the trailer is a half-honest indicator. Emphasizing the notion that Coppola’s film will be a “stylized” take on Antoinette’s life, the trailer is scored with a song by New Order called “Age of Consent.” Does this mean the whole of Antoinette is going to be scored like A Knight’s Tale and basically be a piece of historical fluff aimed at the women of taste, education and breeding who read Cosmopolitan? I can feel loathing building for this thing already. Coppola’s screenplay is based on Lady Antonia Fraser’s “Marie Antoinette: The Journey,” which I haven’t gotten around to, but the impression is that it’ll basically be a girl movie about what a fun-filled erotic dream palace Versailles was in the 1780s, and how Ms. Antoinette was basically the Paris Hilton of her day. One of the main reasons people went to House of Wax was to see Hilton get killed, and I don’t think I’m alone in saying there will be severe disappointment if Coppola’s fantasist-protagonist, played by Kirsten Dunst, doesn’t get her head cut off at the end…and I really want to see the head falling into the basket, please. (Like in the beheading scenes in the Wajda film…sticky blood soaking the cobblestones.) But I’m a bit worried about this prospect because the trailer doesn’t contain noticable hint of that pesky French revolution brewing outside the gates. Dunst’s costars are Jason Schwartzman (as King Louis XVI), Rip Torn (King Louis XV), Judy Davis (Comtesse de Noailles), plus Asia Argento, Marianne Faithfull, Steve Coogan, Shirley Henderson, et. al.
![](https://hollywood-elsewhere.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/240919_Briarcliff_The_App_Banners_300x250_NP.jpg)
The middle-aged machismo clock has struck twelve for Harrison Ford, 63. I’m sorry to say this, but you can tell in the trailer that Ford has gotten too old to be playing that same late 40ish-early 50ish guy — older but studly and physically trim — he’s been in film after film since Clear and Present Danger. He looks his age and then some in Firewall (Warner Bros., 2.10), and you just don’t believe that a guy with a military-style haircut with white sidewalls and a kind of imperceptibly bent-over walk who basically looks like Uncle Festus from Bakersfield would have a teenaged daughter and a 10 year-old son with a 42 year-old wife (Virginia Madsen). Audiences may decide this doesn’t get in the way of the film (which is pretty good by the way…review coming this Friday), but Ford’s appearance keeps intruding into your consciousness as you watch it. There’s a rugged fight sequence that Ford performs with a younger costar near the end, but you can’t help think while watching it, “Could a guy this old, even if he works out like a Marine every day, really keep up against a guy 30 years younger in a knockdown brawl like this?” At a certain point movie stars known for their cool, panther-like machismo have to face up to the calendar and think about playing their age. (And no, this doesnt invalidate my idea about Ford and Steven Spielberg totally ignoring his age factor in the forthcoming Indy 4 flick and having him do the same grueling physical stuff he did in Raiders of the Lost Ark because it would be a good running joke if they did that.)
The second of its kind to be acquired by Paramount Classics, White Planet is an animals-struggling-to survive-in-a-barren-white- wilderness movie. Just because it sounds like a Penguins wannabe doc doesn’t mean it necessarily is. We all know life is rarely a day at the beach, and here are two films — White Planet and The Call of the North — reiterating this emphatically and at the same time stressing the importance of good parenting.
This 2.7 New York Times story about detective Anthony Pellicano‘s latest difficulties with the law (i.e., prosecutors have hit him with a 110-count indictment accusing Pellicano of racketeering and conspiracy, wiretapping, identity theft, witness tampering, and destruction of evidence) says he “masterminded a sprawling wiretapping ring that helped his clients gain an advantage in disputes with opponents including actors, reporters and talent managers.” Uhm, yeah, I know…my phone was tapped by Pellicano (or one of his guys) in the summer of 1993 not long after my Last Action Hero dustup. I don’t know who hired him to do this, but it was a little chilling and I was ticked off at the time,. Amd yet looking back it all seems mildly amusing, like an episode of Mission Impossible. That aside, I’ve come to an opinion about Pellicano, which is that he’s a decent guy. He helped me with some research for an article a couple of years ago, and it made my work easier and the piece ultimately better. I believe in turning pages and moving on to new chapters. He who lives by the sword will die by the sword, etc., but by doing me a favor in ’03 I think Pellicano was making amends on some level for what happened ten years earlier. I think we both kind of knew that, and I felt a kind of symmetry from this.
![](https://hollywood-elsewhere.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/240919_Briarcliff_The_App_Banners_300x250_NP.jpg)
Another clever guerilla trailer for an ’80s movie in a new context, in the vein of that joke trailer for The Shining that everyone went nuts over last year.
Putting aside the curious matter of James Cameron‘s Battle Angel, which Cameron said last September would be rolling by early ’06 but which he didn’t even briefly mention during an on-stage interview in Santa Barbara the night before last (Monday, 1.6), it’s been revealed in a Business Week piece that Cameron is working on a screenplay called Project 880, which he describes as a piece of “completely crazy, balls-out sci-fi.” If it gets made, Cameron intends it to be a video experience first and a movie second. The article said it would be a “unique interactive experience” that “will be preceded by the opening of a massively multiplayer online RPG √¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢√É‚Äû√É¬Æ a video game in which thousands of Internet-connected players simultaneously interact, compete, and cooperate….before seeing the film at the theater.”
Grizzly Man director Werner Herzog seems to have a knack for encountering (or is it attracting?) a certain odd chaotic energy in Los Angeles. First he came across Joaquin Pheonix in his rolled-over car and helped him get out of the car and get to his feet, only to disappear into the night. Then last week (i.e., apparently within the last few days) he was shot in the lower abdomen with an air rifle pellet while doing a video interview with a BBC Two’s “Culture Show” host Mark Kermode. Here’s Kermode’s video piece. First you see the shooting happen with Herzog flinching in response to the crack of rifle fire and asking Kermode, “What was that?” (Kermode told Slash Film’s Maria Belilovskaya for a story filed on 2.6 that Herzog said “as if it was the most normal thing in the world, ‘Oh, someone is shooting at us. We must go.'”) Later Herzog shows his wound to Kermode’s camera and he’s not only bleeding, and bravely nonchalant about it. “It was not a significant bullet, and I’m not afraid…I’m not afraid of anything,” he tells Kermode. “The poet must not avert his eyes. You have to talk a bold look at your environment, at what is around you…even the decadent things, even the dangerous things. Danger is out there, but so what? I’ve done good battle. I’ve been a good soldier…a good soldier of cinema. And that’s what I want to be.”
![](https://hollywood-elsewhere.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/240919_Briarcliff_The_App_Banners_300x250_NP.jpg)
The new Hollywood issue of Vanity Fair is on the stands and the cover, shot by fashion guru Tom Ford, features a buck-naked Keira Knightley and Scarlett Johansson posing with Ford himself. An MSNBC news story says that Johansson’s pear-shaped buttocks are fully viewable in the cover’s fold-out portion. Angelina Jolie is reportedly also bare-assed in the issue, posing in a bathtub. Here’s a B-roll video of the photo shoot, which happened Nov. 11 in Manhattan.
Anthony Breznican‘s 2.6 piece in USA Today says that Kevin Smith‘s Clerks II, which will hit theatres in the fall, “is so audaciously raunchy — one scene is sure to challenge the squeamishness of even the most ardent gross-out comedy fan — that Smith says the film may ultimately make its debut unrated, even if that restricts its availability at some theaters.” He quotes Smith as saying that “in terms of the edginess of the humor, I don’t think we’ve ever gone this far before. People who are really critical of us and dismiss us for making (dirty-joke) pictures: They’re right, they’re not wrong. But at the same time, that’s not all we do.”
I wrote a column last July complaining about Fox Home Video having failed to put out a DVD of Lamont Johnson‘s near-great, largely unsung The Last American Hero, a moonshine-smuggling and race-car movie with Jeff Bridges, out on DVD. And now, almost seven months later, Fox Home Video has put it out on DVD. Pauline Kael loved this film, and Johnson (whom I called last summer) is alive and well and with a lot of stories to tell, so of course, naturally, FHV has put out a bare-bones DVD without any kind of making-of doc or a commentary track from Johnson or Bridges. (I told Bridges about the release of the Hero DVD last weekend prior to the screening of the Harry Nilsson doc, and he didn’t even know about it.) The Last American Hero “was the only high-velocity ’70s redneck film that was any good, and it wasn’t even a redneck film,” I wrote on 7.15. “It was a scrappy piece of backwoods Americana about a young guy on the wrong side of the law who went on to become a famous stock-car racer, a movie that was actually loved by critics and was also an unfortunate financial disaster. For me, this is the super-daddy of redneck movies, the one that got it right with unaffected realism and a kind of dignity by not dealing in the usual cliches and showing respect for its characters, and by being intelligent and tough and vivid with fine acting. Hero was loosely based on Tom Wolfe’s legendary 1965 Esquire article about one-time moonshine smuggler and stock-car racer Junior Johnson. Wolfe’s piece was called “The Last American Hero is Junior Johnson. Yes!” As movies steeped in rural southern culture go, The Last American Hero had roughly the same levels of honesty and sincerity as Coal Miner’s Daughter, which came out in 1980.” Read the Wolfe article, and please, please buy or rent the DVD. (I’m more than a little surprised that none of the leading DVD sites and columnists are even mentioning it, much less reviewing or recommending it. The New York Times‘ usually on-top-of-it DVD columnist Dave Kehr has ignored it entirely, or did in today’s column at least. And you can’t even find the Hero DVD when you do a search on www.dvdtalk.com)
![](https://hollywood-elsewhere.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/240919_Briarcliff_The_App_Banners_300x250_NP.jpg)
- Really Nice Ride
To my great surprise and delight, Christy Hall‘s Daddio, which I was remiss in not seeing during last year’s Telluride...
More » - Live-Blogging “Bad Boys: Ride or Die”
7:45 pm: Okay, the initial light-hearted section (repartee, wedding, hospital, afterlife Joey Pants, healthy diet) was enjoyable, but Jesus, when...
More » - One of the Better Apes Franchise Flicks
It took me a full month to see Wes Ball and Josh Friedman‘s Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes...
More »
- The Pull of Exceptional History
The Kamala surge is, I believe, mainly about two things — (a) people feeling lit up or joyful about being...
More » - If I Was Costner, I’d Probably Throw In The Towel
Unless Part Two of Kevin Costner‘s Horizon (Warner Bros., 8.16) somehow improves upon the sluggish initial installment and delivers something...
More » - Delicious, Demonic Otto Gross
For me, A Dangerous Method (2011) is David Cronenberg‘s tastiest and wickedest film — intense, sexually upfront and occasionally arousing...
More »