Day: July 20, 2006

“The two taboos in Hollywood are child abuse and the killing of animals,” a source tells N.Y. Daily News columnist Lloyd Grove. “In this movie, both things happen.” Actually, Grove reports, the script for Hounddog , described as “a dark story of abuse, violence and Elvis Presley adulation in the rural South,” calls for a character to be played by Dakota Fanning, 12, “to be raped in one explicit scene and to appear naked or clad only in underpants in other shots or scenes.”

Hold up…I think this issue should be handed over to Kathy Griffin…no? Hound- dog, which will reportedly cost less than $5 million to shoot, will be directed by Deborah Kampmeier (Virgin), who also wrote the script.

A second smart-guy-and-accomplished-writer — Nerve‘s Bilge Ebiri — defends Lady in the Water.

Slate‘s Kim Masters on the alleged Spielberg- Cruise rift, or perhaps the Capshaw-Cruise rift is putting it more accurately.

Oren Aviv, the former Disney marketing prez who’s now production president in the wake of Nina Jacobson‘s firing three days ago, has told N.Y. Times reporter Laura Holson the following: (a) “I want to make movies like The Pacifier,” (b) that he was “surprised when Disney chairman Dick Cook asked him last weekend to succeed Jacobson”, and (c) that he “never asked for this job.” It’s a safe bet that Aviv will indeed be looking to make more Pacifier -type films, and of course that third statement is a totally honest one. People who move up the corporate ladder never do so through lean and hungry scheming.

“What makes Clerks 2 both winning and (somewhat unexpectedly) moving is its fidelity to the original ,em>Clerks ethic of hanging out, talking trash and refusing all worldly ambition. If anything, the sequel is more defiant in its disdain for the rat race, elevating the white-guy-doing-nothing prerogative from a lifestyle choice to a moral principle.” — N.Y. Times critic A.O. Scott.

A defense of M. Night Shyamalan by Slate‘s Ross Douthat. Key passage: “While Shyamalan may be a narcissist with delusions of grandeur, he’s also a filmmaker of rare talent and creativity (these are hardly mutually exclusive categories, after all), and however lousy Lady in the Water proves to be, he deserves to survive this summer of embarrassment and live to film again. He’s not a Dylan or a Disney, to pick just two names from the roster of ridiculous comparisons that [Michael] Bamberger fastens on, and his potential has often gone frustratingly unfulfilled in the nine years since Haley Joel Osment told Bruce Willis about all the dead people he kept spotting. But Shyamalan’s missteps have been interesting, his mistakes worth a second look, and his obsession with the integrity of his own artistic visions, however irritating, has distinguished him from nearly all his young-Hollywood competitors.”

“It was just around the time when the giant eagle swooped out of the greater Philadelphia night to rescue a creature called a narf, shivering and nearly naked next to a swimming pool shaped like a collapsed heart, that I realized M. Night Shyamalan had lost his creative marbles. Since Mr. Shyamalan’s marbles are bigger than those of most people, or so it would seem from the evidence of a new book titled ‘The Man Who Heard Voices’ (and how!), this loss might have been a calamity, save for the fact that Lady in the Water is one of the more watchable films of the summer. A folly, true, but watchable.” — N.Y. Times critic Manohla Dargis

I have to pack and blow town and get down to San Diego for Comic Con, so no more postings until late tonight. I don’t even have my press credentials but the site says I’ll be okay if I just show up with clippings (the term “clippings” sounds like such an anachronism) and a business card. I’ll take as many photos as I can. I just hope there are wi-fi areas inside the San Diego Convention Center. I think it’s fair to say that the heat is on Friday afternoon’s Snakes on a Plane presentation in more ways than one, given New Line’s decision not to let anyone see it until the night before the 8.18 opening.

One of my biggest pet peeves is the emotional flavoring that the Fox operator uses when she says the words, “…while your call is transferred.” I don’t know who Fox hired or who coached her, but listen to the schpiel and then pay close attention to how she gives an extra ladelling of maternal sweetness to the last four words. To me, it’s insincere and even a tiny bit odious. She sounds like Louise Fletcher playing Nurse Ratched in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Tell me if you don’t agree.

There was a top-secret screening of My Super Ex-Girlfriend (20th Century Fox, 7.20) last week on the Fox lot, but I wasn’t shrewd or pushy enough to get into it (and you do have to “work it” to find out about these showings and wheedle your way into them by hook or crook) so no reaction from this corner. I could have seen it last night but I decided to see World Trade Center instead.

A friend who caught it last night disputes David Poland‘s view that it’s “an epic of misogyny”, although knowing how movies of this ilk tend to go (especially ones directed by Ivan Reitman), I wouldn’t be surprised if Poland is on the money. The friend says that while You, Me and Dupree had no one big scene you can talk about with your friends and joke about, My Super Ex-Girlfriend has at least two…so there you go.

The coming Disney layoffs plus the big studios saying “no” to rich big star deals on movies are seen as evidnce of “an industrywide contraction,” and some in Hollywood are getting more and more scared of this, reports L.A. Times staffer Claudia Eller. “It’s as if the managerial elite has made a secret pact to adhere to certain business principles that they want to enforce on agents and artists,” says producer Brian Grazer. Eller says that Grazer “sees studios as more rigid today about how far they’ll stretch to compensate even the biggest stars, directors, producers and writers on movie projects,” and, he says, “that’s never happened in the 25 years I’ve been producing.”

The new Saw 3 trailer will have its world premiere in theatres before showings of The Descent, which Lionsgate is opening on 8.4. Not online…screens only. Drop everything, cancel the trip to the Home Depot, put off the cat’s declawing at the vet, put both cars in the garage and batten down the hatches….the Saw 3 trailer is hitting screens on the same day as The Descent. (Who was that guy in the ’50s who was known for going “Oooh! Oooh!” in low-budget comedies?)