Month: April 2006

John Travolta‘s the only guy I ever spoken to with a son named Jett (just like me), and here’s a Rush & Molloy piece about an affliction (possibly autism) that Travolta’s 14 year-old son seems to be coping with. The autism info comes from Mark Ebner‘s Hollywood Interrupted site. Tough cards either way, and I’m sorry.

Here’s an interview with film critic Godfrey Cheshire, who wrote the influential two-part essay, “Death of Film/Decay of Cinema,” on Matt Zoller Seitz‘s “The House Next Door.” The Cheshire interview is by guest contributor Jeremiah Kipp . Definitely worth a read-through.

“I haven’t read the orginal script for The Break-up, but it sounds like the girly-girls in the audience just didn’t want Jennifer Aniston guy-less at the end. If there wasn’t another strong viable male character for her to end up with, then I guess the director and the writers had to figure out how to put her back with Vince Vaughn, even if the rest of the movie is telling us they don’t belong together. That’s an awfully big change. Maybe they should just have a final scene of her sitting alone in a bar…free at last, free at last, thank Dod almighty. And then George Clooney saunters over and they smile and things start to click right away.” — Eric Williams

Peter Sarsgaard and Maggie Gyllenhaal are my idea of a serious talented couple with very relaxed, no-problemo cool-cat dispositions, and now on they’re on the way to taking things legit and having a kid and all that…cool.

N.Y. Observer “Transom” columnist Choire Sicha visited the besieged and embattled Jared Paul Stern at his home in the Catskills two days ago, and here’s what came of it.

“I think United 93 is the best film of the year so far. I almost wished I hadn’t seen the A&E telefilm. I thought it was cool that John Rothman (older brother of Fox honcho Tom Rothman) and David Rasche (star of TV’s Sledgehammer series) were in it as two of the passengers. [Director Paul] Greengrass is opposed to the war in Iraq, so the ending card — ‘America’s war on terror had begun’ — that you cited smacks to me of studio meddling.” — Connected industry guy

This is hilarious: Defamer has a comment from a reader who says he just attended a screening on the Universal lot of the new, happy-ending version of The Break-up (Universal, 6.2), which came out of a recent re-shoot that came about, according to that “Page Six” item, because of negative reactions to the original finale of the film in which costars Jennifer Aniston and Vince Vaughn don’t get back together. Anyway, the reader says he “saw a test screening of [the version with the happier ending] last night at Universal (yeah, I was recruited at AMC in Burbank), and at the panel afterwards, pretty much everyone HATED the new ending they tacked on to make it seem like they got back together…and I mean hated it.” For what it’s worth, a well-connected source of my own just told me this test screening did indeed happen, and that the reactions to the new ending WERE pretty bad. He also told me what the original ending was: Vaughn and Aniston meet up some time after they’ve split and they’re both in new relationships, and yet Aniston’s new boyfriend looks exactly a lot Vaughn and Vaughn’s new squeeze looks an awful lot like Aniston. This sounds pretty funny to me…funny idea and a potentially very funny scene. My source told me that “endings almost always test badly…people almost never like the endings they see….especially if someone dies at the end.” I think on some level it’s the Some like It Hot curse. That’s a pretty well-known classic film, and anyone who’s seen it knows it has one of the greatest endings (and greatest final lines) ever, and it’s really tough to come up with something as good as that and yet people want something in that realm, and…well, life’s a bitch.

Some folks at Cinematical have responded to my United 93 review, and I responded to some of what they said, etc. Sorry for my misspelling and dyslexia, but I was in a rush. Anyway, I’ve been able to correct the boo-boos since. A woman named Martha Fischer who doesn’t want to see United 93 took exception to being called a coward, which is what I more or less said earlier, and I responded thusly: “Sorry to be the bearer but yeah…you kind of are that, Martha. No offense and all but yes, I feel that you are definitely a run-and-hider. I respect the fact that there are thousands of like-minded souls in your boat (or do I mean ‘arc’?), and it’s okay if you want to turn your head and push those memories away and ‘move on,’ as it were. I sound like I’m being facetious but I’m trying not to be …seriously, to each his own. I just happen to think you and your brethren are basically being babies about this. I’m saying this because I feel that I know whereof I speak. I used to be terrified of looking at an illustration of a certain big beaver in a kid’s book when I was four or five years old, and my mother never threw that book out — she kept it in a bottom bureau drawer and it always unnerved me, knowing it was sitting there. I knew I NEVER wanted to look at that Godawful scary beaver again…never! Now, who knows? Maybe if all the courageous, strong-in-their- heart Americans like yourself join hands and resolve that while 9/11 happened, they can also resolve not to think about it, and if they keep doing that then maybe the residue of 9/11 will eventually go away altogether and then…well, I guess if the residue is permanently erased then 9/11 never really happened, right? I mean, it ‘happened’ but if enough babies join hands and resolve that they don’t want to think about it or reconsider it or remind themselves what it was like or, God forbid (please…no!…NO!) consider the historical-geopolitical reasons why it might have happened in the first place (you know…like those pesky nabobs Noam Chomsky and Gore Vidal have?), then it’s kind of like saying that if we all really believe in fairies then maybe Tinkerbell can be brought back to life. I don’t mean to upset you, seriously…go ahead, ignore United 93, it’s fine…..but it really is a totally pro-level, respectful and respectable film about what definitely happened, and what might have happened, and perhaps what should have happened.”

People have written this morning about CNN.com’s “quick vote” question of the day, asking how many readers intend to see United 93 when it opens on 4.28. (CNN’s idiot search engine won’t take you to it, but the “quick vote” thing is on the lower right portion of the page.) One reader told me 80% of the respondents have said they would not see the film. Another reported that as of 10:15 this morning that of the 42,555 who’ve answered the poll so far, only 8474 respondents — a bit less than 20% — said they’d be seeing the film. Maybe if Universal and exhibitors made a special offer to pass out little pink and blue baby blankets to first-weekend patrons, so they could have something to hug and cover themselves with as they watch it…?

Jurors at the trial of accused 9/11 plotter Zacarias Moussaoui yesterday “heard the first public playing of the cockpit voice recorder of United Airlines Flight 93, the hijacked jetliner on 9/11 that missed its target thanks to a passenger uprising,” says this CNN story. The ending of this story (aknowledging this can’t be avoided) conflicts with the ending of Paul Greengrass‘s United 93, but certainly not in spirit. And that’s all I’ll say.

If you look down on the lower-left search engine you’ll notice you can now conduct two separate site searches — one for the Hollywood Elsewhere column archives and one for the WIRED column. The WIRED search engine works just beautifully, and I think the page is pretty nicely designed also. A big thanks much to the great Jim Stanley, a very creative and diligent guy, for throwing this together.

“I’m not one of those ‘too soon!’ types, and I work in the Pentagon. I luckily managed to be out of town on 9/11, but I had many coworkers and friends in the building that day, and my brother lived in Manhattan at the time, so I’m about as close as one can get to that day without actually being there. And I have no problem seeing United 93. It’s history, and as long as it’s done as history — i.e. no JFK-like inventions of fantasy — it’s worth our time. Anyway, I had one tiny beef with your piece: whereas I may personally think that you are ‘very, very much mistaken’ when you assert that Iraq War has nothing to do with the War on Terror, we can agree to disagree. But my reaction to reading Paul Greengrass‘s ending card, ‘America’s war on terror had begun,’ is that such an observation ignores that we’d been fighting this war on terror for over twenty years before 9/11. I will sadly count the victims of Islamic terror in Tehran 1979, Beirut 1983, the Achille Lauro 1985, the European airport attacks 1985, the Berlin discotheque 1986, the Lockerbie 1988, World Trade Center 1993, Africa 1998, the U.S.S. Cole 2000…countless hijackings, assassinations and suicide bombings as all part of the War on Terror, all fought long before September 11th. The War on Terror didn’t begin on 9/11, but that’s the day America finally chose to fight back.” — Dave at Garfield Ridge.