Day: March 1, 2007

I had a Collateral moment about ten days ago that I forgot to mention. It’s significant because (a) it’s straight out of a key scene in Michael Mann‘s film and (b) it’s never once happened in the 24 years I’ve lived in this town. I’m talking about a face-to-face with an unperturbed, zen-like coyote. Every animal I’ve ever been close to outside of a zoo has exuded some degree of caution or fear, but not this guy. He was in some kind of zone and couldn’t have cared less.

It was around 10 pm. I’d just turned right onto a dark side street off La Brea south, somewhere between 3rd and Sixth Street, and there he was in the middle of the street. He seemed utterly indifferent to my slowing down and lowering the window and snapping a photo. He stood there for 10 or 12 seconds, and then sauntered over to La Brea. For a second I worried about him getting hit by a car.” Then I thought, not this guy…coyotes know how to survive this town better than me. He crossed La Brea like a champ and disappeared into an alley.

Slate‘s Kim Masters is commenting that the Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu–Guillermo Arriaga feud is still happening because of a statement by joint statement by Babel collaborators (Inarritu among them) in Mexico’s Chilanga magazine that attacks Arriaga, to wit: “It’s a shame that in your unjustified obsession to claim sole responsibility for the film, you seem not to recognize that movies are an art of deep collaboration.” But magazines sometimes take a while to come to press, and for all we know this letter may be several weeks old.

I’m saying this because roughly 30 days ago in Santa Barbara I observed what looked like “a reapprochement between formerly feuding collaborators Inarritu and Arriaga. Inarritu went up to the sitting Arriaga and gave him a hug; Arriaga reciprocated with a couple of comradely slaps on the back. Then they left the room together and stood alone out on the brick patio, shooting the shit for nearly ten minutes, no evident tensions whatsover. I thought to myself, ‘This would make a historic photo…the duelling amigos back together again’…but a voice told me to stay away.”

Premiere‘s Stephen Saito on the the 20 Worst Post-Oscar Career Choices of all time. Cuba Gooding is absolutely “da man” in this regard, but Saito reminded me about Richard Attenborough, Roberto Benigni, Halle Berry, Adrien Brody, Michael Cimino, Faye Dunaway, Sally Field, Louise Fletcher, Brenda Fricker, Cuba Gooding Jr., Louis Gossett Jr., Helen Hunt, Gwyneth Paltrow, Sydney Pollack, Susan Sarandon, Mira Sorvino, Kevin Spacey, Hilary Swank, Marisa Tomei and Robin Williams.

Jeff Leeds‘ N.Y. Times piece is about James Cameron and Jimmy Iovine having “formed a venture that will produce concerts and films in 3-D,” fine.

But the headline — “A Comeback in 3-D, but Without Those Flimsy Glasses” — is bit confusing since there’s no mention of the 3-D process that Cameron and Iovine are working with being viewable without 3-D glasses. There’s a sentence in the piece that says that the Cameron-Iovine glasses “now resemble standard sunglasses, and musicians may be able to make their own designs.”

Oh, I get it — the new glasses are no longer “flimsy”. What, like they were in the early to mid ’50s? The glasses I wore to watch the IMAX 3-D portions of Superman Returns weren’t in the least bit flimsy; they were made of rugged, fairly thick plastic and felt almost like ski goggles. How old is the Times editor who thought up that headline?

I recognize the venality, but I couldn’t help chuckling at a certain reader response to Gawker’s report that Tom Cruise is “in contract for an apartment at the Dakota” for something close to 20 million bucks. Allusions/ parallels between Katie Homes and Mia Farrow‘s manipulated/imprisoned character in Rosemary’s Baby aside, a guy wrote, “I’m going to start passing out copies of The Catcher in the Rye to all the local crazies.”

Nine or ten years ago I raved about Marlon Brando‘s inspired air-bubble death scene in Edward Dmytryk‘s The Young Lions, which I happened to watch again last night on DVD. The scene is the second to last one, as I recall (I can’t locate the original Mr. Showbiz posting), and I don’t think anyone has died since with such remarkable delicacy and finesse.

Brando’s Christian Diestl is in a German forest not far from an abandoned concentration camp, sick of war and soldiering and bashing his rifle against a tree in a mad rage. He then runs down a hillside and right into the rifle sights of Army G.I. Dean Martin, who immediately opens up. The fatally wounded Brando tumbles down the hill and lands head-first in a shallow stream.

The camera goes in tight; his mouth and nose are submerged. A series of rapidly- popping air bubbles begin hitting the surface — pup-pup-pup-pup-pup-pup-pup — and then slower, slower and slower still. And then — this is the mad genius of Brando — four or five seconds after they’ve stopped altogether, a final tiny bubble pops through. There somethiing about that last little pup that devastates all to hell.

I’ve sure I’m prejudiced toward Brando. (He also died brilliantly in Viva Zapata, tucking himself into a kneeling fetal ball with his arms outstretched and his palms facing up as he’s riddled with bullets fired by an ambush posse of several Mexican soldiers.) I’m sure many others have died just as vividly. If anyone can describe an exceptionally fine death scene — one so good you can only go “wow” — please share.

One of the absolute worst death scenes of all time is when Burt Reynolds is shot at the end of Robert Aldrich‘s Hustle. The way he falls and breathes his last is atrocious.

In response to Bruce Willis being named as a former client of Hollywood madam Jody Gibson in a tell-all book hitting the stores today, Willis’ pit-bull attorney Marty Singer has told Page Six that “it’s a total fabrication…[Willis] doesn’t know the woman, he’s never met the woman. My client doesn’t need to pay for sex, he doesn’t pay for sex.” Whoa there, sunshine…every man on the face of the planet pays for sex. Dinners, movies, pledges of support, career investments, gifts, lifestyle subsidies, spontaneous endearments, etc. As Otis Young‘s “Mule” says in The Last Detail, “Any pussy you get in this life you’re gonna have to pay for, one way or the other.” (I just checked with the great Robert Towne to make sure the line is correctly quoted, and he said, “Yep, that’s it.”)

The hope/talk/rumble is that Susanne Bier‘s next film, the English-language Things We Lost in the Fire, will play at the Cannes Film Festival two and half months from now. The Dreamamount release is just about done, I’ve been told, and Pete Hammond, who interviewed Bier last Monday night at a film class, has written that Benicio del Toro‘s performance in the upcoming film is allegedly “dynamite award-calibre.” Pic also stars Halle Berry, David Duchovny and Alison Lohman.

The official Dreamamount press website synopsis reads as follows: “When Audrey Burke (Berry) loses her husband in an act of random violence, she forges an unlikely relationship with Jerry Sunborne (Del Toro), a heroin user who was her husband’s best friend from childhood.”

Sounds a little 21 Grams-y…no?

“DreamWorks Pictures Presents a Scamp Films Production of a Susanne Bier film, Things We Lost in the Fire . Directed by Susanne Bier, from a screenplay written by Allan Loeb. The film’s producers are Sam Mendes and Sam Mercer, and Executive producers are Pippa Harris and Allan Loeb. This film is not yet rated.”

If anyone’s interested in a nice quick vomit (as, you know, an aesthetic exercise), all they have to do is click on this. Michelle Monaghan asking lifelong platonic pal Patrick Dempsey to be her “maid of honor”, which he agrees to do only so he can attempt to stop the wedding and woo her before it’s too late…..blecch! And to put a red bow on it, Paul Weiland, the guy who gave us City Slickers II, is going to direct. Amy Pascal strikes again! That’s it for Monaghan also — she was cool in ’04 and ’05 (Bourne Supremacy, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, North Country) but the honeymoon’s over.

“You took a perfectly good genre picture and turned it into a fucking art film!” — referring to the landmark 1995 serial-killer flick Se7en and allegedly/famously yelled by a certain producer (Arnold Kopelson?) at director David Fincher, according to Philadelphia Weekly critic Sean Burns.

Burns is calling Zodiac “a brilliantly sustained aria of obsession and failure” and “an absurdly entertaining, two-and-a- half-hour, $75 million shriek of alpha- male OCD impotence.”

I abhor dubbed films, but if Sony Classics wants to get the jump on the American version of The Lives of Others that Sydney Pollack, Anthony Minghella and Harvey Weinstein are planning to make, why don’t they just hire English-speaking actors with German accents (including original Others cast members like Sebastian Koch, Ulrich Muhe and Martina Gedeck) to lip-synch an English-with-German-accents version that can be booked in the rube areas?

The Hollywood Reporter‘s Gregg Kilday announced today that the first new project under the just-renewed pact between the Weinstein Company and Mirage Prods., the production company run by Sydney Pollack and Anthony Minghella, will be — yoicks! — an English-language remake of Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck‘s The Lives of Others, which won the Best Foreign Language Oscar last Sunday.

Note: image stolen from nervepop’s Bilge Ebiri

I wrote Pollack earlier this morning about this, mentioning that news about the Lives of Others remake is getting around (i.e., Bilge Ebiri wrote something also), and some people are going “whaat?”, and that perhaps he might want to talk some specifics about the remake. No reply yet (it helps if people can get back to me within the hour when I write them about a story or an item — they can blow me off if they want to & that’s fine, but the clock is always hyper-driving here and the pace is always 24/7 breathless) so here’s what I said:

“Surely it’s occured to you and Anthony that your Lives of Others remake for Harvey Weinstein will (a) lose force and gravitas if transposed to an American setting (i.e., the original being very specific to East Germany and Stasi wiretaps and the mid ’80s) and (b) it will therefore essentially become (as Peter Bart told Hollywood Wiretap‘s Pete Hammond a few days ago) The Conversation.

“I’m writing to ask if the American remake that Mirage/Weinstein Co. is doing is going to be set in the U.S. of A., and if so, in what time period? I’m presuming it would be shot here because a literal remake set in 1980s East Germany with the actors speaking German-inflected English would be silly.

“It staggers me to think that there’s a sizable American audience out there that’s refusing to see Florian’s film, despite it being one of the most emotionally moving political thrillers-slash-love stories ever made & despite last Sunday night’s Oscar, simply because they dislike reading subtitles. I can’t even call that posture ridiculous…you just have to throw up your hands.”