Month: August 2006

I guess we’re never going to see any stills of Ben Affleck in that those old, clunky-looking TV series Superman suits he wears in Allen Coulter‘s Hollywoodland (Focus Features, 9.8). He wears them in two or three scenes — the brown-and-gray tunic (worn when the show was shot in black and white) once, and once or twice in the brilliant red and blue outfit. There must be a prohibition in effect. I don’t know why this is interesting, but here’s an exclusive shot of the two suits from IGN’s “Stax” Flixburg.

When I was at San Diego Comic-Con two or three weeks ago I flipped through a copy of Sid Jacobson and Ernie Colon‘s “The 9/11 Report”, a 144-page graphic-novel version of that 2004 document. There’s something weird about looking at comic-book images of that day and reading approximation terms like “WHOOOM!” to describe the sound of United #175 slamming into the south tower. But if you’re going to illustrate something like this I guess there’s no avoiding generic moves. Jacobson and Colon are old pros, both in their 70s.

You’d think there’d be a prominent mention of this book on the site for Hill & Wang, the division of Farrar, Strauss and Giroux that’s publishing…but there’s not. (And it doesn’t turn up when you do an in-site search.) “The 9/11 Report” will be in book stores as of 8.22. The thing that would really sell, I imagine, would be a graphic novel version of Loose Change.

Women are often disrobed and filmed in a stylish, lip-smacking way in Brian DePalma’s films, and the trailer for The Black Dahlia (Universal, 9.15) seems to indicate he’s maintaining his signature. Nothing wrong with this — just predictable. The forthcoming booking at the Edinburgh Film Festival (8.14 to 8.27) is fine, but my reservations still hold.

“I’ve traveled the world and seen it everywhere — we lost the trust of the world,” World Trade Center Oliver Stone has told L.A. Times columnist Patrick Goldstein. “So now we have more death from terror, not less. We haven’t fought smartly. We’ve fought stupidly. We’ve overreached.”

The footage of the guy sitting shotgun inside Pamela Anderson‘s black SUV, quivering and bent over like a traumatized child, is like something out of a Dogma film from the late ’90s. He and Anderson are the leads in a Los Angeles tragedy by Lars von Trier.

“It’s a horror film based on an insane asylum that’s been converted into a college, and these kids that end up going to this college all have dark secrets in their past. [The college is] haunted by this doctor who used to perform lobotomies on kids, thinking he was doing a good thing for them by erasing their nightmares, but he was actually really sadistic. So it’s twisted and gory and psychological.” — Snakes on a Plane director David Ellis talking about Asylum, his next contribution to the rigor and glory of cinema. It begins shooting on 9.18 in South Carolina for Hyde Park Entertainment, with 20th Century Fox apparently having some interest in distributing.

Writers — serious writers of books and plays as opposed to, say, journalists — are not very interesting people to make films about. They’re almost as bad as painters. Morose, self-destructive depressives…terrific. Unless the film follows the writer on an intense real-life adventure of some kind, as Fred Zinneman‘s Julia did with an episode in the life of the young Lillian Hellman. Or better yet, if the movie somehow injects its writer character into a surreal realm of his/her own devising, like Joel and Ethan Coen did with John Turturro‘s gloom-head screenwriter in Barton Fink, or like David Cronenberg did with a William S. Burroughs-like character in his adaptation of Naked Lunch.
The latter approach, apparently, is the idea behind Paul Giamatti‘s untitled, just-announced film about Blade Runner author Phillip K. Dick movie, which Giamatti’s Touchy Feely Films will produce with Anonymous Content. The screenplay, to be written by Tony Grisoni (Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas), will use elements from Dick’s unfinished novel “The Owl in Daylight.” The visually surreal aspects of Tery Gilliam’s Fear and Loathing mixed with an “Owl” synopsis (found on Wikipedia) offer clues about what Giamatti’s film will be up to. In fact, it sounds like it may contain similarities to Lady in the Water as well as an echo or two from Kurt Vonnegut‘s Slaughterhouse Five and Spike Jonze‘s Being John Malkovich.
Giamatti will play Ed Firmley, a composer of music scores for second-tier horror and sci-fi films who gets mugged by a squad of deaf alien humanoids — emissaries of a species that can’t hear but enjoys amazing visual abilities — who implant a micro-chip in Firmley’s head so their brethren back home can monitor and experience his life. The aliens soon become disinterested in the idea when they realize what a cheeseball-level composer Firmley is, and from this point is where the story truly takes flight. The meaning of the “The Owl in Daylight” title is presumably self-explanatory.

The history of movies about writers is mostly colored in varying shades of tedium.
My nomination for the worst movie ever made about a playwright is Arthur Hiller‘s Author! Author! (’82).
Christine Jeffs‘ Slyvia, with Gwynneth Paltrow as suicidal author Sylvia Plath, turned out far better than Larry Peerce‘s The Bell Jar (’79), but that didn’t make it pulse-quickening in and of itself.
Ernest Hemingway‘s times in Italy during World War I resulted decades later in one of the worst wartime romance movies ever made, Richard Attenborough‘s In Love and War (’96) as well as the middling Rock Hudson–Jennifer Jones romance A Farewell to Arms (’57).
I don’t have any recollections of Peter MacNicol‘s “Stingo” being an especially riveting character in Alan Pakula‘ s Sophie’s Choice (’82).
Al Freeman Jr.’s budding writer character in Castle Keep (’69) had a few pithy lines, but mostly seemed to fade into the woodwork.
I have mostly dreary recollections of Vincent D’Onofrio‘s Robert Howard character in Doug Ireland‘s The Whole Wide World , and also of Jennifer Jason Leigh‘s Dorothy Parker in Alan Rudolph‘s Mrs Parker and the Vicious Circle.
On top of Turturro in Barton Fink, Peter Weller’s “Bill Lee” in Naked Lunch and Jane Fonda’s Lillian Hellman in Julia, I can think of two other absorbing writer characters: Joseph Fiennes ‘ Will Shakespeare in Shakespeare in Love and Leonardo DiCaprio‘s Jim Carroll in The Basketball Diaries.

Richard Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland‘s Quinceanera (Sony Pictures Classics) is a nice little cultural mixer (gays and Hispanics in L.A.’s Echo Lake district) and an above-average indie drama. The story moves along, nothing feels arch or forced, and all but one of the characters are likable. The one who isn’t — the problem — is Emily Rios, who plays the central character of Magdelena, whose pregnancy gets her kicked out of her home and leads to her staying with an 80-something uncle (Chalo Gonzalez) along her gay cousin Carlos (Jesse Garcia), etc. The glitch is that Rios plays her character like a sourpuss all through — irritated, frowning, scowling — and spending time with her is a drag. It’s not Rios herself — she’s lively enough off-screen — but Glatzer and Westmoreland’s decision to cover Magdelena in downer molasses.

Quinceanera star Emily Rios “playing” Magdelena in a poster shot for the film (l.) and at last month’s Seattle Film Festival (r.)

11 years ago, to mark the 100th anniversary of cinema, the Vatican (expressing its wisdom through a site maintained by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops) made known its choice of 45 all-time great films. You’d think they could have at least gone for 50 or 60 films. You’d think they’d also would have updated the list last year to honor the 110th anniversary. That aside, the Vatiican made some decent calls back in the Clinton era; plus their critic knew how to write and sounded moderately sophisticated. The films are blocked into three categories: religion, values and art.

This photo of the late Jayne Mansfield, taken from a dance-hall sequence in Raoul Walsh ‘s Sheriff of Fractured Jaw (’58), is taken from Dave Kehr‘s DVD column on the N.Y. Times site. Some Times guy working for the tech squad has obviously squeezed it horizontally, and the effect is more than weird. It’s almost spooky.

Mansfield’s face somehow reminds me of Don Keefer‘s on that Twilight Zone episode called “It’s a Good Life” — the way Keefer looked after being turned into a plastic jack-in-the-box head, I mean. A mere photo hasn’t creeped me out this much since I was six or seven years old.

This has been an incredibly soft day. In terms of stuff to get into, I mean. I feel numb, drifting. Like I’m in a rowboat without oars. It’s so draggy I’m reduced to tapping out items like the one you’re reading right now. It’s so slow I’m linking to a Bill Maher/Mel Gibson piece that was Huffington Post-ed five days ago. Pathetic. This is a good excerpt, though: “Mel, let me remind you: The Jews have not started all the wars in the world. But they have greenlit all the movies.”