Year: 2006

Unlike the Academy, the Hollywood Foreign Press likes to keep things simple. If a movie is spoken in a foreign language and is also, you know, set somewhere off these shores, it’s a contender for a Best Foreign Language Golden Globe award….even if a L.A.-based distributor funded it. The result, says Hollywood Reporter guy Gregg Kilday, is that Mel Gibson‘s Apocalypto and Clint Eastwood ‘s Letters From Iwo Jima “could” be in the running against Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck‘s The Lives of Others, Pedro Almodovar’s Volver and Guillermo del Toro‘s Pan’s Labyrinth in the 64th annual Golden Globe Awards.
The Academy, Kilday explains, “gives a certain weight to the country of origin, allows only one film to be submitted per country and has no mechanism for the U.S. to submit a movie. But the HFPA considers any film in a foreign language that screens for its members by its deadline. Does that mean a fantasy film using a made-up foreign language that takes place, say, on the ice planet of Hoth is eligible? How about a film set entirely in a U.S.-run Japanese internment camp in the early ’40s and spoken entirely in Japanese?
By the way, the online version of Kilday’s story mis-spells Henckel von Donners- marck’s first name — they left out the “l” in Florian.

Some faces are so authoritatively creepy they do more than stay in your memory; they seep into your psyche, your bones …little pan flashes of something long buried. This guy — I won’t insult his iconic status by identifying him or mentioning the film he starred in — got so far under my emotional skin when I was a kid that he’ll probably stay with me into my next life.

Every time I see this chilling face I think of how he was described: “The sum of all intelligence”…and then I see those reptile tweezer fingers. It’s not that he’s “scary” — it’s knowing for sure that face will never be erased.
The question is, who else in films has had a truly startling puss — something out- there in either a scary or beautiful or mesmerizing way — that you can’t forget him/ her no matter what, no matter how many years have passed?
One of my all-time favorite faces belongs to the young Trevor Howard in Brief Encounter , followed closely by Holly Hunter‘s in Broadcast Newsm and Bob Mitchum‘s in Out of the Past. There was something close to haunting about Leonardo DiCaprio‘s in The Basketball Diaries and Romeo + Juliet. As spell- blnding as Max Shreck’s face was in Murnau’s Nosferatu, I think Klaus Kinski outdid him in the ’79 Herzog version. John Wayne ‘s weather-beaten, squinty- eyed face in Red River….Anna Magnani ‘s in Open City or Guilietta Masina‘s in La Strada….Adam Sandler ‘s in Reign Over Me (seriously). I could go on for pages.

Sheigh Crabtree strikes again — the second Riskybiz post in a 24-hour period. This one says (most) everyone at a recent Manhattan screening of Dreamgirls was delighted and applauding. She adds, however, that costar Jennifer Hudson didn’t quite get a 100% approval rating. (One guy was saying Jennifer Holiday was better in the early ’80s B’way show…read the item.) Speaking as a mixed-bag responder who knows other mixed baggers, I can say that if there’s any one unanimous feeling about Dreamgirls, it’s that Hudson kills & that the Best Supporting Actress Oscar is pretty much hers to lose.

After he suffered a bout of insomnia last Saturdaywhile staying at London’s Ritz Hotel, Al Pacino reportedly “came down to the lobby at 2 am and instead of doing a jennifer Lopez or whatever and complaining and making all kinds of demands about having his room changed, he said he wanted to get to know the people who worked at such a great place” — or so it says in this Mirror story. Pacino, I’ve been told, is in London working on a Looking for Richard-like documentary called Salomaybe, about Oscar Wilde and his play “Salome”. Because of this project his emotonal pores are more open than usual. He’s in one of his gregarious-Al, get-down-with-the-folks, receptive-to-the-beauty-and-poetry-of-life modes. Nobody in the world is a sweetheart 24-7.

“Given all the publicity surrounding Borat, Sacha Baron Cohen may now be too well known, some say, to fool enough people into taking Bruno — his forthcoming Universal project, which he’ll star in and write and probably produce — as seriously as is required to make the film work,” according to a piece by L.A. Times writer Lorenza Munoz about Universal execs possibly feeling “buyer’s remorse” about agreeing to fund and distribute Cohen’s next comedy, about a gay guy named Bruno.

Come to think of it, Munoz’s sources may have a point. Obviously a lot more people are going to recognize Cohen when he tries to shoot docu-style footage in gay bars or wherever. The world is on to him. “He’s going to have a real tough time making Bruno and so is Universal,” predicted Edward D. Fagan, a New York attorney who’s representing two Romanians who are suing Cohen, 20th Century Fox and several others connected with Boratfor alleged civil rights violations. ‘The cat’s out of the bag,’ he said.”

I could do a mass e-mailing of the New York film publicist community, but I might as well use this space to announce that Hollywood Elsewhere will be trolling the streets of Manhattan and Brooklyn starting this Friday and throughout the rest of the month. Looking very much forward to (i.e., close to panting for) that very specific New York action and energy, along with the blessed wearing of scarves and overcoats.

I’ve agreed to a 12.1 review embargo on The Good German (Warner Bros., 12.15) but this Riskybiz item submitted by the Hollywood Reporter‘s Sheigh Crabtree about director Steven Soderbergh getting a “Bronx cheer” following a DGA New York screening two nights ago (i.e., Saturday) leaves an impression that this 1940s-era black-and-white drama is some kind of marginal embarassment and/or unintended hoot. (Crabtree reports that one guy in the audience went “puhleeze” and that a geezer asked Soderbergh during the q & a if he’d intended “to do a spoof or a parody of The Third Man?”) And it’s not.
I’ve seen German twice in Los Angeles, both times with seasoned industry types, and nobody’s gone into a dismissive neg-head chortle about it. Not in my pres- ence, at least. The reactions have been…well, okay, admittedly muted here and there but always respectful. No one I spoke to was deriding it or grumbling on their way out to the parking lot.
Set in the post-World War II rubble of Berlin, The Good German is a very period- esque, Third Man-ish experience, but it’s not spoofy in the slightest. It’s not Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid and it’s not Young Frankenstein and anything like that. Except for the final scene it’s relatively earnest (as far as a film like this can be) and straight and about itself. It’s partly a tribute piece — a recreation of a military whodunit drama as it might have actually looked and moved if, say, Michael Curtiz had directed it in 1946 — and partly a Phillip Marlowe detetective story in uniform.
That’s all I’m saying for now. I just felt that a defense was necessary.

Producer Saul Zaentz has been quoted by a German fantasy-film website called Ebenwald that Peter Jackson will direct The Hobbit for the Saul Zaentz Company. (I tried finding a mention of Saul Zaentz on the Ebenwald site, but nothing turned up.) Zaentz appparently acquired the rights to one or more works by Rings writer J.R.R. Tolkien in the mid ’70s. The Hobbit “will definitely be shot by Peter Jackson,” Zaentz has apparently said. “Next year The Hobbit rights will fall back to my company. I suppose that Peter will wait because he knows that he will make the best deal with us. And he is fed up with the studios: to get his profit share on the Rings trilogy he had to sue New Line. With us, in contrast, he knows that he will be paid fairly and artistically supported without reservation.”

A couple of months ago I mentioned the snob syndrome among the elite big-city film writers. I said “there’s something vaguely arid and ingrown about this culture…a certain tendency to sidestep films with what an elitist would describe as plebian emotionalism.” And now here’s Time‘s Richard Corliss elaborating on this aversion as a prelude to a thumbs-up review of Darren Aronfosky‘s The Fountain.
“Movies critics can’t agree on much, but there’s one assumption most of them hold deeply without ever discussing it. It’s that a film that says life is crap is automa- tically deeper, better, richer, truer than one that says life can be beautiful.
“That’s a 180 from the prevailing notion in classic Hollywood, where optimism was the cardinal belief, at least on-screen. (It was in the front office that the knives came out.) Most movies, whatever their genre, were romances; they aimed for tears and ended with a kiss. But to serious critics then, and to the mass audience now, sentiment is suspect. Feeling is mushy, girly — for fools. To be soft- hearted is to be soft-headed.
“So critics will see a horror film with extreme violence, or (less frequently) an erotic film with extreme sex, and accept these as genre conventions, whether or not they’re grossed out or aroused. But a movie that tries to make them feel is some- how pandering to their basest or noblest emotions and, as they see it, deserves a spanking from any smart reviewer. These days, nothing is as easy to deride as dead-serious romance.”

“Animation came in for a number of reasons. There were certain moments that weren’t on film, especially the trial. We needed a way to show what was happening in the courtroom. We could have done it in renactments, or though talking heads, or we could have had courtroom drawings panned and scanned.

“But I thought animation would have served as commentary on the trial; Jerry Rubin called it a `cartoon show,’ and when I read that quote, the bells went off.” — Director Brett Morgen talking to John Anderson in the N.Y. Times about his long-in-preparation, partially animated documentary Chicago 10, which will open the 2007 Sundance Film Festival.

Kevin Smith vs. Orlando Sentinel film critic Roger Moore — good rantin’, good readin’.

A well-reported piece by the San Francisco Chronicle‘s Ruthe Stein about odd bookings of specialty films. Basically about the “impact of a 7.8 earthquake” caused by the recent opening of the Century Centre plex, the overpowering of the indie-oriented Landmark chain, various trickle-down effects, etc.
“Devoted Bay Area moviegoers may feel like Alice Through the Looking Glass when they scan theater listings to locate the latest must-see specialty film [since] nothing seems to be playing where logic would dictate it should anymore,” Stein writes.
“Another shakeup is certain to occur when Sundance Cinemas completes renovations expected next spring on the Kabuki, formerly owned by AMC, and pursues the same independent fare the competition is vying for.”