Month: February 2006

Variety has finally run Robert Koehler‘s review of Who Is Harry Nilsson (and Why Is Everybody Talkin’ About Him)? more than two weeks after it played the Santa Barbara Film Festival, but the review has two errors. The boozy rock genius died on January 15, 1994 (doc says that his funeral service happened on the day of the big ’94 California quake, or 1.17.94) and not ’92, as Koehler has it, and Nilsson’s hot song “Coconut” (as in “put the lime in the…”) was heard in Reservoir Dogs but was not “notoriously revived in the [Michael Madsen, ear-amputation] torture sequence” — that was the Steeler’s Wheel tune “Stuck in the Middle With You.”

Intriguing Guardian piece by Paul Hoggart about a new Nick Broomfield doc called His Big White Self, about Eugene Terre Blanche, the “hippo-shaped, rhino-tempered” leader of South Africa’s extreme racist Afrikaner Resistance Front. It’s being aired 2.27 on British TV along with a retrospective of Broomfield’s past docs (Biggie and Tupac, Kurt and Courtney, etc.) Hoggart mentions that`Broomfield is “busy editing his first original drama, based on the death of Chinese cockle-pickers in Morecambe Bay, which is due to screen later this year.” This naturally raises the question, “Whatever happened to Indecent Exposure?” Two or three years ago Broomfield was developing and trying (with the assistance of producer Edward R. Pressman) to direct a feature about the tumultuous life and tragic death of Hollywood producer David Begelman, based on the David McClintick book. I read the script — it was 85% “there” and just needed a little psychological background material. It had a reading at New York’s Public Theatre by a group of respected actors (including James Gandolfini) and then…nothing.

It’s fair to ask why Patrick Goldstein’s Gail Berman column hasn’t been linked on Movie City News as of this morning (i.e., Wednesday, 2.22). The “Big Picture” author has gone after MCN’s David Poland two or three times (most recently in that piece he ran in December about blogs over-hyping the Oscar race). This history seems to imply that MCN (which links to just about everything and anything) is ignoring Goldstein as a kind of get-back. I find this surprising because Poland is nothing if not thorough — very little happens in the movie realm that escapes MCN’s linkage, and the response time is always quick. But it’s been 24 hours since Goldstein’s 2.21 piece first appeared and nothing.

Wellspring‘s theatrical distribution operation is being shuttered and the Weinstein Co.-controlled operation will henceforth be based in Santa Monica and focus entirely on DVD distribution. (And I never got paid for that Reel Paradise ad I ran last summer…shit. Has that train left the station or can I chase it down and talk to the conductor?) The spiritual loss will be felt. Any distributor that puts films like Werner Herzog’s The White Diamond, Jacques Audiard’s The Beat That My Heart Skipped, Arnaud Desplechin’s Kings and Queen, Vincent Gallo’s The Brown Bunny and Jonathan Caouette’s Tarnation (among many others) into theatres is a valuable one, and will be very much missed.

A decent, boilerplate, right-down-the-middle piece about the social legacy of Brokeback Mountain by USA Today‘s Scott Bowles (with help from Anthony Breznican). Many celebrity quotes, same old territory. But at the end of the piece along comes Judy Shepard, mother of the murdered gay martyr Matthew Shepard, telling Bowles that her son “gave her a copy” of the Annie Proulx short story that inspired the film. “She doubts the movie will have an immediate effect on gay rights ‘because some people are ashamed to go see it,'” Bowles writes, quoting Shepard. “‘Even some of my friends — my friends — say it’s just a gay cowboy movie and are afraid of something like that.’ But when people can rent it privately, ‘I think they’ll see it how I see it: as a story that’s trying to say that you can’t help who you fall in love with. If it opens just a few eyes to that, then it’s done a good thing.'”

Of all these godawful titles in Mark Caro‘s “Pop Machine” blog piece, which draws from decades of Hollywood history, none rankle (or have rankled) as profoundly as Oliver Stone’s World Trade Center. (Whoops…repeating myself.)

Patrick Goldstein‘s Big Picture column got into the Gail Berman hoo-hah today (Monday, 2.21), and used a quote from that “Scent of Toast” piece that I ran a week ago Sunday, and he was nice enough to say that “it quickly became the talk of the town” when it came out. Two-thirds of it was an edited-down letter I got from a professional woman who has beefs about Berman, and a third was composed of quotes this woman gave me when we spoke on the morning of Sunday, 2.12. After talking for 40 minutes or so she struck me as an authentic player-combatant. (You develop a nose for this stuff.) She refused at first to even identify her profession, but later she copped to being an agent. Goldstein seems to be needling me a bit in his column for not getting her name, rank, social security number and fingerprints, but…aaah, forget it.

A little touch of Charles Bukowski to pass the time…“The Genius of the Crowd“ and “The Soldier, the Wife and the Bum“.

When I think back to Peter Jackson‘s far-reaching, underwhelming King Kong, which arrives on DVD next month, I think of the sad sequence atop the Empire State Building at the very end, with Kong’s eyes starting to dilate just before he bids his final farewell to Naomi Watts and then slips away, somehow managing a nice clean fall down to 33rd Street without crashing against the jutting-out sides of the building (like his great- grandfather inevitably did in the ’33 version). And that’s all that sticks, really. Portions of the running-around-on-Skull-Island stuff were exciting and amusing, but they’ve been steadly fading since I first saw it, and if you add this to the numbing effect of the first 70 minutes, widely acknowledged as talky and tedious, and you have a film that has not aged well…not at all. Although I still want to watch it one or two more times on DVD.

Flying back to L.A from San Fran this morning, a Gavin Hood interview this afternoon at the Four Seasons regarding Tsotsi…no further posts until late this afternoon. Okay, maybe one more.

Josh Horowitz talks to director Whit Stillman (Barcelona, Metropolitan) about his disappearing act. Horowitz: “What about the ‘whatever happened to Whit Stillman?’ stuff that’s been written about you? Does it bother you? Stillman: “That doesn√¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢√É‚Äû√ɬ¥t bother me. What bothers me is that I haven’t done anything.” (laughter) Horowitz: “It is noteworthy, I think, to realize that Terrence Malick has released two films in the time since you released your last one.” Stillman: “That’s embarrassing.” (laughter)

Better late than never: N.Y. Times DVD guy Dave Kehr riffs on Lamont Johnson‘s The Last American Hero …a longish reflective lead piece and everything. Released in ’73, Hero was “the sort of midlevel movie that would soon disappear from Hollywood as American movies fragmented into big-budget event films (Mr. Bridges lent his presence to one, the 1976 remake of King Kong) and no-budget genre pictures. The uncondescending, eye-level view of the American South here seems perfectly pitched, its triumphalism muted (Jeff Bridges‘ Junior Jackson wins races but has a harder time with his lady love, played with sparkle by Valerie Perrine), and its scale neither overbearing nor overly restricted.”