Day: July 27, 2006

Congrats also to Danish director Asger Leth and producers Cary Woods and George Hickenlooper for their doc, Ghosts of Cite Soleil, getting into Toronto also. I wrote about Ghosts after catching it last March. It’s about two pistol-packing Haitian brothers who ran slum gangs during the final months of Jean Bertrand Aristide‘s presidency, and how things got worse for them after Aristide was deposed.

After seeing it, I wrote that “I now see Haiti as less of a Ground Zero for abstract political terror and more of a place where people on the bottom rung are trying to live and breathe and create their own kind of life-force energy as a way of waving away the constant hoverings of doom. In short, this excellent 88-minute film adds recognizable humanity to a culture that has seemed more lacking in hope and human decency than any other on earth.”

Ethan Hawke‘s The Hottest State is a drama based on Hawke’s debut novel, set in Manhatttan, about a frustrating relationship between a Texas actor named William (Mark Webber) and a singer/songwriter named Sarah (Catalina Sandino Moreno), with a previous romantic interest named Samantha (Michelle Williams) flitting in and out of his life. And now Hawke’s 117-minute film will play as an out-of-competition selection at the upcoming Venice Film Festival. Which means, presumably, it’ll show at the Toronto Film Festival also. State also stars Laura Linney, Sonia Braga and Hawke.

I’ve been reading about Doug Liman‘s currently-lensing Jumper, a $100 million-budgeted supernatural thriller based on the Steven Gould novel about a 17 year-old (played by 20 year-old Vanity Fair and Being Julia costar Tom Sturridge) with emotional problems who discovers he can teleport from one place to another, and how he uses this gift to sleuth around for the guy who killed his mother, blah, blah. Another variation on Spider-Man (young superhero with hang-ups) and Batman (murdered parent naturally calling out for exposure and revenge). I should mention there are reports that Sturridge has been whacked and that Liman is replacing him with (God forbid) human death-star Hayden Christensen or costar Jamie Bell. This Moviehole Comic-Con item, based on a chat with Jumper costar Samuel L. Jackson, says “Christensen might be joining [Jackson]” on Liman’s film. There’s are two IMDB postings stating flat-out that Sturridge has been fired. The plan is allegedly (emphasis on that word) to do re-shoots in November with whomever the new star is, if in fact Sturridge is history. I think I’m supposed to care about this and make calls to New Regency right about now. That’s the expected thing, I mean.

Episode #1 of “Tabloid Wars“, the six-part series focusing on the uphill, day-to-day hump that various N.Y. Daily News staffers experienced last summer, preemed on Bravo last Monday evening and will be repeating all this week. (There’s an airing today at 6 pm eastern.)
N.Y. Times critic Allesandra Stanley says the series is “not really about the circulation battle between New York’s two famously competitive tabloids” — Bravo’s home-team paper and the New York Post . The latter “is barely seen” in the series, she says, and its name “is invoked with smoldering hatred, like Osama bin Laden or Moby-Dick.” Instead, the series “follows reporters and city editors as they scramble to cover hate crimes, cop shootings and celebrity scandals.”
I’m especially interested in the episodes that focus on gossip columnist pals George Rush and Joanna Molloy, who were good enough to give my son Jett an intern gig last summer. George tells me that episodes featuring himself, Joanna and Rush & Molloy contributors Jo Piazza and Chris Rovzar are #1 and #5. (The Bravo guys shot footage of Jett so maybe there’ll be a glimpse.)

On one hand, this trailer for Asylum’s straight-to-video Snakes on a Train (8.15) makes a persuasive case that it’s just a jerkwad ripoff of Snakes on a Plane with ickier makeup and prosthetics. But having seen that eight-minute product reel for Snakes on a Plane at Comic-Con last weekend, it doesn’t seem that much sillier than the New Line film. It seems trashier, yes, but also trippier and more ludicrous. And with a wider selection of snake sizes. (Train‘s poster-art concept of a big snake putting its mouth around an entire train car isn’t, it turns out, just a drawing-board concept.) Oh, and here‘s New York Post critic Lou Lumenick interviewing Asylum’s David Latt.