Month: January 2007

20th Century Fox has officially announced that James Cameron will really, no-shit-really start lensing Avatar for them in April 2011 with an expected release date in the summer of 2013. Yeah, I’m kidding again…like I did when I wrote this other pissy-snarky item about Cameron and Avatar about two weeks ago. The film will be shot in digital 3D (“a blend of live-action photography and new virtual photorealistic production techniques invented by Cameron’s team”)…big deal. Technical paint-brushings are strictly secondary considerations. Will the story be any good? That’s what counts, hombre. Will anyone give a shit about the characters? Will Cameron really have it completed and on-screens by 2009, or roughly five or six months into Barack Obama‘s first term?

An IGN staffer has seen a big-deal fight scene from Spider-Man 3 (i.e., the second most tedious Summer ’07 three-quel after Pirates 3) at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas and….described it? Horace Greeley used to describe things. Where’s the clip?

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San Francisco Chronicle critic Mick LaSalle riffing on Al Gore and at one point bouncing off a riff of my own about the metaphor of his weight vs. global warming warnings.

If you go by the notion that a projection of character and personality in Presidential candidate is what attracts votes (and not philosophy or policies or governmental administrative know-how), this un-aired Spike Jonze video of Al Gore sitting around and being himself (mostly in the company of his family) during the 2000 election would have elected him hands down if…a big “if”…this video had been shown all over the place and everyone had taken the five or six minutes to watch it.

Edward Rothstein says in his N.Y. Times review of Jack Sullivan‘s “Hitchcock’s Music” (Yale University Press) is well observed, but when are the Times guys going to wake up and run music links (like this one, say, and this one also) with reviews of this sort?

“Hitchcock, without ever drawing a line between the popular and high arts, explored his chosen genre with a firm belief about the powers of music,” Rothstein writes. “Music can provide an archetype for Hitchcockian suspense. Music can hint at more than it says; it can unfold with both rigorous logic and heightened drama; and despite all expectations it can shock with its revelations.
“Sullivan’s book suggests that Hitchcock’s musical faith was more profound than any he could have had about people. And this faith was shared by a generation of film composers who worked with him and were also √É∆í√Ǭ©migr√É∆í√Ǭ©s to the United States in the 1930s and ’40s, including Erich Korngold, Miklos Rosza and Dimitri Tiomkin.

“Despite the events they lived through (which provided their own form of menace and resolution), they shared a conviction that the culture of music had such power that it could match the increasing dominance of film. It could stand in confidence alongside it, knowingly alluding to ambiguities, complexities and multiplicities that not even Hitchcock’s heroes could entirely figure out before the films’ end.”

Advertising Age‘s Jeremy Mullman observes the obvious is noting that the L.A. Times, “desperate for new revenue sources as it’s beset by declining circulation and advertising sales, is aggressively angling for the $50 million award-lobbying ad market long dominated by Variety and The Hollywood Reporter with its print version of “The Envelope.”
“I can’t put out an 800,000-circulation daily broadsheet, but they’re able to cover, in print, almost exactly the same subjects we cover,” Variety publisher Charles C. Koones tells Mullman. “Given the realities of their business, they have to look at every possibility, and it makes sense that they’d look at this.”
“Times execs say moving ‘The Envelope’ into print is part of a larger initiative to make the paper as dominant in entertainment as The Washington Post is in politics. “This is the Times doing more of what it has done, and more of what it should have done,” said John T. O’Loughlin, the paper’s senior vp marketing, planning and development.”
In other words, the Times was slacking before?

Earlier this evening 60 Minutes guy Morley Safer interviewed Helen Mirren, as if she needed another media voice telling everyone that she’s got the Best Actress Oscar in the bag. Little Bitty Problem: the clips don’t play and there’s no sound to boot.

Blair Erickson‘s pretty damn persuasive trailer explaining why Children of Men should be Oscar-nominated for Best Picture, on www.somethingawful.com. Note: the link to Erickson’s video technically belongs to Movie City News in total eternal cyber perpetuity because David Poland posted it earlier than Hollywood Elsewhere.

“For those who can’t appreciate a good story without having every little detail explained to them, and who can’t imagine any plausible reason for Children of Men‘s set-up (i.e., a world where humans can no longer reproduce), let me provide a possible reason: genetic warfare.
“At some point in history of this film’s world, someone engineered a virus that would cause sterility, and released it on a population in order to commit genocide. But it was an airborne and it got loose and became more virulent than predicted, and affected everyone that it came in contact with. Okay? Not that difficult to imagine, and good stories often let you use your imagination a little bit. Some people even enjoy using their imagination.
“But really the story doesn’t require you to know the why of the premise; the premise is plausible enough to hang the story on it, without having to explain why.” — Bkemper on Diggs.com.

“Last January at the Sundance Film Festival, when Alan Arkin saw the 1,200-seat auditorium where Little Miss Sunshine would be screened, he wondered if he needed to figure out how to protect himself, in this case from exaggerated expectations. “I was nervous,” he said. “It’s a little movie. I thought it was going to tank.” — from Margy Rochlin‘s N.Y. Times profile.

This is why Mark Wahlberg has very good traction as a Best Supporting Actor contender.