Month: March 2007

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.”

L.A. Weekly critic Scott Foundas is calling David Fincher‘s Zodiac “a study in the passage of time and the accumulation of massive amounts of information — a movie that seems to be unfolding inside of a cramped storage locker. And it is, though it may not sound like it, thrilling to behold.” This ties into that complaint mentioned in a piece by Village Voice critic Nathan Lee, a friend of his groaning that “I felt like I was stuck in a filing cabinet for three hours” and Lee responding, “Exactly!”

Here we go with another “Al Gore may be too fat to be president” riff, this one written by Pop Machine‘s Mark Caro. And here’s another Caro thing about dumping the short film Oscars.

An early February Nikki Finke Deadline Hollywood Daily story ran the following quotes: (a) “If Al Gore has slimmed down 25 or 30 pounds, Lord knows [what he might do]” and (b) “Gore’s weight, which has ballooned since he left office, is widely seen as a barometer of his ambitions, and the Clinton, Obama and Edwards campaigns have been studying his girth closely.”

This ties in with Mick LaSalle‘s “fat Al” riff from a couple of months ago.

There’s also this weight thing I wrote about a year ago: “[An Inconvenient Truth] is very persuasive, but it would be a tad more so if Gore were a little bit thinner. He’s not Oliver Hardy but he looks very well fed, and the metaphor is obvious. The under-message of An Inconvenient Truth suggests that a new kind of austerity is vital for the earth’s survival, and I feel it would play better if Gore looked like someone who practices more denial.”

Oscar’s biggest loser Kevin O’Connell, a sound-mixer who’s been nominated 19 times and lost every time, was allegedly “dissed” by Oscar-winning Dreamgirls sound-mixer Michael Minkler last Sunday night, to wit: “I think Kevin should go away with 19 nominations, Kevin is an okay mixer, but he should take up another line of work.”

Now The Envelope‘s Tom O’Neil is reporting that O’Connell’s mom died Sunday night — very sad, very sorry — but it seems that Minkler was probably trying to be droll. Dry humor is an art form; ditto deadpan delivery. You have to get it just right. I’m guessing that Minkler’s timing was off and it came out wrong.

The wrinkle is that Kris Tapley riffed on the same thing about 24 hours ago, which Defamer picked up on.