Month: May 2006

An AICN correspondent named “Mutant Camel” claims to have seen Brett Ratner‘s X-Men 3: The Last Stand (20th Century Fox, 5.26), and I don’t know. He doesn’t have that quasi-measured circumspect tone that tells me a writer is coming from at least a somewhat perceptive or trying-to-be- thuggishly-thoughtful place. He sounds too effusive and geeky, like a plant trying to sound like he isn’t one.

That said, he likes it…and yet one of the things that seems to warm his heart is the intense violence. Terrific. “If the last one was subtitled X:Men: United, the subtitle of this one should be X-Men Kick the Holy Crap Out of Each Other for 2 Hours.”
http://www.aintitcool.com/display.cgi?id=23285

“Box-office prognosticators don’t necessarily think that the summer season will tank after M:I:3, but Hollywood seems certain to suffer through another bad weekend if Warner Bros.’ Poseidon is as weak as advance tracking suggests. Even a senior Warner executive concedes, ‘We’re all pretty much aware that ‘disaster film’ will take on a whole new meaning on Friday .'” — from Kim Masters‘ 5.10 Slate piece about the renewed box-office concerns, called (but not limited to the particular subject of) “The Fall of Tom Cruise: Hollywood frets over the weak opening of Mission: Impossible III.

“As any geek can tell you, HDTV comes in several degrees of resolution: 720p, 1080i and 1080p. Weirdly, Toshiba’s HD-DVD player can’t send out 1080p, which is the holy grail. (To be sure, this standard is still rare among TV sets, but it’s the wave of the future.) You should know, too, that you’re guaranteed the sensational high-resolution HD-DVD picture only if your TV set has an HDMI connector (a slim, recently developed, all-digital jack that carries both sound and picture). If you use S-video or component cables instead, you may see only 25 percent of the resolution you’re supposed to get — a maddening antipiracy feature that the studios can invoke at their option. The A1 does deliver the spectacular picture and sound promised by Toshiba. Should you buy one, then? Not unless you’re an early-adopter masochist with money to burn.” — from N.Y. Times columnist Eric Pogue’s 5.11 column, “Why the World Doesn’t Need Hi-Def DVD’s”

“Christians have not been this worked up about a movie since Martin Scorsese‘s Jesus stepped down off the crucifix in The Last Temptation of Christ in 1988.” — Laurie Goodstein‘s N.Y. Times piece about the various ways hot-headed Catholics are planning to protest Ron Howard‘s The DaVinci Code (Columbia, 5.19).

Why is the Cannes Film Festival press-screening The DaVinci Code, a movie that lasts about 150 minutes, at 8:30 pm on Tuesday the 16th rather than, say, the slightly more workable hour of 7 pm? Especially considering that a good portion of the viewers will be jet-lagged Americans? Because Sony publicists have arranged for Ron Howard‘s film to be shown to Cannes press at more or less the same time that New York and Los Angeles journos will be seeing it. The Gotham screening, I gather, will happen around 2:30 or 3 pm (a film critic for a major weekly told me that the Cannes screening will actually begin “a half-hour earlier” than the Manhattan screening). By this logic the Los Angeles showing would obviously be happening around noon, although a press pal says that the only LA press screening for DaVinci he knows about is set for Wednesday, 5.17, at 7pm at Hollywood’s Arclight .

There’s a launch party happening at the Columbus Hotel in Monte Carlo on Tuesday, 5.16 — the night before the Cannes Film Festival begins — to announce the International Emerging Talent Film Festival , which hopes to begin each year a few days before Cannes. American Cinematheque’s Margot Gerber is handling U.S. publicity. Participating supporters include producers Tricia Van Klaveren (Lying, Edmond), Bruce Cohen (Big Fish ), and George Litto (The Crew). I’d go but that The DaVinci Code press screening at 8:30, man…it’s a toughie.

I heard last night from a seasoned director-writer who’s something of an aficionado of fantasy flicks and has no agenda against Bryan Singer that I know of, and his message said that “an agent at UTA is referring to Superman Returns as Heaven’s Cape.” I get the thought but not the analogy. Singer puts passion into his films, but he’s never been and is nowhere near the wildly indulgent egomaniac that Michael Cimino reportedly was, etc. The import of this crack, obviously, is that the “okay, let’s trash this sucker sight unseen” mentality is extending beyond the geeks who’ve been gunning for this film for months and into the “suit” ranks. The reason I’m running it is because I didn’t like that too-positive “plant” review that ran on AICN a while back. If WB is smart they’ll stage some early screenings with people like me to try and elicit some counter-views.

I’ve been gift-ticketed into a performance of Alan Bennett and Nicholas Hytner‘s The History Boys this evening, so I guess I won’t be seeing the PBS documentary John Ford/John Wayne: The Filmmaker and the Legend that airs tonight at 9 pm. It’ll screen during Cannes, however, and will be included, as previously announced, in the big fat Ford-Wayne DVD box set that Warner Home Video is releasing on 6.6. Here’s Brian Lowry‘s review in Variety.

The fearless Ross Johnson on the parallels (or lack of them) between Hollywood’s own accused wiretapper and alleged hit contractor Anthony Pellicano and (a) Pablo Escobar, (b) Charles Bronson (and particularly Bronson’s character in Breakout), (c) Sonny Barger, (d) Suge Knight, (e) Alphonse Capone and (f) Shelley Winters.

Congratulations to Kevin Smith and the Clerks II gang for their film having been chosen to show at the Cannes Film Festival as an Official Out-of-Competitioner. It’ll show at midnight towards the end of the festival. (Smith’s p.r. guy Tony Angellotti has told me that Clerks II will have an earlier-in-the-day press screening for poopheads like myself who hate staying up until 2:30 or 3 a.m.)

The news came down around May 5th (I don’t know why the Cannes programmers took so long to come to their decision) and the plan was to hold until an official announcement on Monday, 5.15, but the news broke today so here it is. I’m hearing, by the way, that Smith’s film might open in July rather than August. Considering it was going to open on 8.18 opposite Snakes on a Plane, I’d say that’s a smart move. Smith will be in Cannes for the Southland Tales competition screening, an AMFAR benefit that Harvey Weinstein has something to do with, and his own Clerks II debut on 5.26.

Robert De Niro‘s The Good Shepherd (Universal, 12.22), a drama about the evolution-devolution of a CIA superspook (Eric Roth‘s script is based on the life of James Jesus Angleton), has gotten a mixed response from a couple of AICN correspondents. The responses to perfs by Matt Damon and Angelina Jolie are fine, but the film has otehrwise been described (and obviously it’s early in the game for December ’06 release) as long (around three hours), “boringly filmed” and that it “needs a lot of work.” It costars Alec Baldwin, Joe Pesci, Keir Dulleau and De Niro.