Day: August 14, 2006

Honestly, truly — if you were Alan Horn and Jeff Robinov at Warner Bros., would you greenlight a second Superman film? Would you want Bryan Singer to “go all Wrath of Khan-y” on it or would you hire someone else of his general calbire?
If it was my call I’d say yes to Singer but under the following conditions:
(1) He has to bring in a two-hour film — no ifs, ands or buts;
(b) Kate Bosworth is dimissed as Lois Lane and Rachel McAdams replaces her in a no-big-deal way, like it was when Val Kilmer was suddenly the new Batman;
(c) All major plot turns and occurences in the script would have to be submitted to a three-person Logic Review Board made up of Superman movie geeks who would ixnay stuff like Superman falling back to earth from gravity when he’s well beyond the earth’s gravitational pull;
(d) No special effects sequences that make you want to go for a bathroom or popcorn break the second time you see the film; and
(e) Singer doesn’t get his sign off on marketing.

Being a big fan of Ira Levin‘s “The Boys From Brazil”, which works extremely well on the page, I was more than a little disappointed with Franklin Schaffner‘s film version, which (I don’t believe this) opened 28 years ago. And now New Line is financing a remake of the Shaffner film to be directed, God help us all, by Brett Ratner, who just keeps digging himself in deeper and deeper with each new film. Has Ratner nudged aside McG, Michael Bay, Roger Kumble and Stephen Sommers for the title of the most despised commercial director on the planet? I don’t know. I’m asking.
New Line reportedly has the idea of Boys being Ratner’s immediate followup to Rush Hour 3, with (I’m guessing) a possible ’08 release.
It’s not just that Ratner’s The Boys from Brazil will probably eat shit on a stick; it’s that a reconstituted Adolf Hitler (brought back through cloning) doesn’t mean all that much to the I-Pod-ers. Baby boomers, whose parents fought World War II, were the last generation to have Hitler’s evil impressed upon them first-hand. And I wonder how much the Hitler brief impresses in the shadows of 9/11, Middle East suicide bombings, Islamic fundamentalism , ethnic cleansing killings, poison-gassings and all the other horrors that have manifested over the past 25 or 30 years. He’s not the superstar he used to be.
Michael Fleming‘s Variety story says Richard Potter and Matthew Stravitz‘s script “pitched a take that sticks close to Levin’s novel but sets the action in the present day” — in other words, they seem to be sticking with Adolf. I really don’t get it. Ratner told Fleming that Schaffner’s version “was a flawed film with a brilliant concept…you no longer have to spend time explaining cloning as you did then.” Cloning wasn’t a problem with the Schaffner version at all, trust me.
(Personal disclosure: I was fairly friendly with Jeremy Black, the kid who played all the Little Hitlers in the Schaffner film, back in the mid ’70s. He comes from Wilton, Connecticut, as I do, as is the son of B’way producer David Black and kid brother of poet Sophie Black.)

Reader Neil Harvey passed along a story that hard-core Chicago actor Gary Sinise is reportedly going to Iraq to perform for the soldiers with his band, the Lt. Dan Band. “I think it’s a good thing that he’s taking time to do something for the troops,” Harvey writes, “but given that in Forrest Gump, Lt. Dan was a fictional soldier who followed a family tradition of being cannon fodder in wars and lost his legs in Vietnam, then returned home to alcoholism and horrible living conditions, it just seems…well, It feels kind of like having the deck band from Titanic perform on a cruise ship with a special appearance by Billy Zane, or to have Bruce Willis‘ “John McLane and the Nakatomi Tower Trio” show up to christen a new skyscraper.”

The thrust of this N.Y. Times David Halbfinger story about World Trade Center ‘s first few days of commercial release is…uhm…that it’s doing well for a 9/11 film? I guess. It’s done much better so far than United 93 did, primarily because word has circulated that it’s a warmer, more conservative-minded, hooray-for-the-regular-guys film. And that it did better in the New York area that in Los Angeles. And that Snakes on a Plane (opening this Friday) poses no challenge. And the word-of-mouth is primed to take flight.
“Everything that we hoped about the movie has started to happen,” Paramount marketing chief Rob Moore tells Halbfinger, “and now it√ɬ¢√¢‚Äö¬¨√¢‚Äû¬¢s about ‘Can you still in this day and age have a movie that can be propelled by word of mouth? You take the movie Oliver made, the initial turnout, the response of the audience and critics, and all of that feels, to us, that we should be able to play and not have a movie that falls 65 percent from Week 1 to 2 and then does all of its business in two weekends. This to us was always a movie that should have exceptional hold. We think it should play for a very long time.”

How strange….how very strange. The reputation of Andrea Staka‘s Fraulein, winner of the Locarno Film Festival‘s Golden Leopard award, has been tainted somewhat by an admission by festival juror Barbara Albert that she co-wrote the film with Staka. How could the festival have allowed even the appearance of a possible conflict-of-interest go unchallenged?
When the news broke last Wednesday, Albert said she would recuse herself from jury discussions relating to the film. And then three days later — Saturday, 8.12 — she resigned from the jury entirely in opes of wanting to avoid the appearance of bias. Obviously, to avoid any trouble whatsover Albert should never have been on the Locarno jury in the first place. One half-presumes she would have never taken any measures if she hadn’t been “outed.” Amazing.
On top of this the festival’s artistic director Frederic Maire, 44, collapsed last Friday night while introducing Little Miss Sunshine in front of a big crowd at Locarno’s Piazza Grande. It’s not fair to throw these two incidents together, but tey do leave you with a vague impression that team Locarno is either eccentric or on wobbly footing, or both.