Month: April 2007

“It’s possible that the only people in this whole sorry story who are not hypocrites are the Rutgers teammates and their coach, C. Vivian Stringer. And perhaps even Don Imus himself, who, while talking way too much about black people he has known and ill children he has helped, took full responsibility for his own catastrophic remarks and didn’t try to blame the ensuing media lynching on the press, bloggers or YouTube.

A N.Y. Times illustration by Barry Blitt that accompanies the Rich column

“Unlike Mel Gibson, Michael Richards and Isaiah Washington, to take just three entertainers who have recently delivered loud religious, racial or sexual slurs, Imus didn√ɬ¢√¢‚Äö¬¨√¢‚Äû¬¢t hire a p.r. crisis manager and ostentatiously enter rehab or undergo psychiatric counseling. ‘I dished it out for a long time,’ he said on his show last week, ‘and now it√ɬ¢√¢‚Äö¬¨√¢‚Äû¬¢s my time to take it.'” — from Frank Rich‘s 4.15.07 N.Y. Times column.

In all the hubbub I never looked at the YouTube clip of Imus committing his original sin. Rich’s article had the link.

Criterion is releasing a two-disc DVD of Lindsay Anderson‘s If…. on 6.19. And in tribute to this, Manhattan-based reader Chris Clark has slapped together a home-made trailer for it, hoping to “maybe drum up some interest for the first-time audience,” as he puts it.

Released in 1968, If… “is a daringly anarchic vision of British society, set in a boarding school in late ’60s England,” the blurb reads. “Before Kubrick made his mischief iconic in A Clockwork Orange, Malcolm McDowell made a hell of an impression as the insouciant Mick Travis, who, along with his school chums, trumps authority at every turn, finally emerging as violent savior against the draconian games of one-upmanship played by both students and the powers that be.

“Mixing color and black-and-white as audaciously as it mixes fantasy and reality, If… remains one of cinema’s most unforgettable rebel yells.”

I found this 4.13 AICN review of Juan Carlo Fresnadillo‘s 28 Days Later (Fox Atomic, 5.11) highly persuasive. The Danny Boyle original (i.e., 28 Days Later) absolutely hooked me on the horrific idea of seething red-eyed zombies who run like quarterbacks, and the following graph is what got me in particular:

“What’s great is that every so often you latch onto a character [and] think ‘oh, that’s obviously the hero’ or ‘well, she’s the heroine’ only to watch them get torn to bits ten minutes later. There’s nothing predictable about who survives and who doesn’t (with one very obvious exception) and the film cleverly wrong-foots you on exactly who√ɬ¢√¢‚Äö¬¨√¢‚Äû¬¢ll be dismembered/eaten/puking blood next.

“In fact, it’s so effective that even innocuous scenes had me wincing because I was expecting something absolutely awful to happen, and there’s no doubt that Fresnadillo enjoys toying with his audience in this way.”

So you pronounce Shia LeBeouf‘s last name how? Lebwehff, Leboaf, Lebuff or Leboof? (His first name is pronounced like “hiya”) And does the popularity of this 20 year-old actor, recently officially confirmed as the second lead in the Indiana Jones IV movie that’ll start shooting in June, signify a multicultural turn in the road in mainstream American culture, at least among the under 25s?

Shia LeBoeuf in A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints

He obviously has an exotic-sounding name — half Middle-Easternish, half French. (I’ll bet 97% of the people reading this right now aren’t 100% sure how to say it.) And yet LeBoeuf is something of a hot commodity, especially when you consider Disturbia‘s surprising $24 million haul this weekend.

This tells me that maybe the xenophobes who’ve told political pollsters they don’t like the idea of a U.S. president being named Barack Obama (i.e., because it ‘s not a whitebread American name) might not be as plentiful as I’d feared. Or at least that they might be confined to the over-45 age bracket.

It wasn’t that long ago, after all, when U.S. movie stars had to have names like Richard Gere or Tom Cruise or they’d be considered too “different” sounding and relegated to the sidelines.

There’s a slight problem, of course, if Indy IV director Steven Spielberg is going to cast LeBeoeuf as Harrison Ford‘s son. I say “if” — no one knows if this is the intention. But if so, problem #1 is that LeBeouf isn’t tall enough — 5’ 10 and 1/2 inches compared to Ford being six-foot-one. (Both my sons are taller than me.) Problem #2 is that LeBeouf looks like he doesn’t come from the same country as Ford, much less from the same gene pool. He obviously looks European (look at that French honker) and clearly hasn’t a trace of Ford’s Irish-Russian features.

Will Ferrell vs. his landlord. Moderately, conceptually amusing in an unforced way. Wait…here’s something funnier.

A little more than two years ago I ran an early Shoot ‘Em Up piece, which was basically about the long hard effort that director-writer Michael Davis underwent in order to get the film funded by New Line Cinema with the help of producers Don Murphy, Susan Montford and Rick Benattar. (New Line execes Jeff Katz and Cale Boyter oversaw things for the studio.) Since then it’s been the usual usual — principal, test screenings, re-shoots, etc. — and now, finally, with a September 7th release date in place.

It began filming in Toronto in early ’06 and wrapped in April, and then Davis cut it over the the next five months or so, and then along came some AICN reactions to a Pasadena test screening last November — mostly positive and one slam.

These and other reactions convinced New Line to fund two days of additional shooting (a new beginning and ending) that happened early last month with star Clive Owen. The film is now set to open just after Labor Day, which some people will tell you is a “dump” date. On the other hand Transporter and Crank — two analagous films — opened on or close to September 7th and did pretty well.

There’s no Shoot “Em Up website that I’ve been able to locate (which seems odd), and there’s no teaser-trailer in “new releases” section of the New Line website. (Here’s a rough cut of a teaser that Latino Review ran last fall.) Someone in New Line’s online marketing branch is feeling under-energized, but the pre-release hoo-hah will almost certainly kick in once the summer season begins.

Whenever any cultural catch-phrase pushes its way into the headlines or the columns, T-shirt makers always rush in to capitalize. Obviously millions of shmucks out there have bought this crap in the past, etc., but the people who rush these things out don’t have an eye for uptown design. I mean, these “Nappy Headed Ho” teddy-bear dolls are pathetic. And here I am giving them added attention.

“I do like weed,” Kirsten Dunst has told a reporter for Live magazine. “I think America’s view on weed is ridiculous. I mean, are you kidding me? If everyone smoked weed, the world would be a better place.”

She’s right, for the most part. Pot is an influencer and molder of one’s spiritual outlook, attitude, philosophy, etc., and it does tend to expose the user to intrigues and fascinations that a beer-head would never consider, much less explore. Plus potheads tend to be cooler, funnier, friendlier. (Well, mostly.) I was totally on the side of Charlie Sheen, Willem Dafoe and the potheads in Platoon, and against the Jack Daniels brigade — Tom Berenger, Kevin Dillon, et. al.

But every heavy pot-user I’ve ever known has had this aura of passive divorcement from life’s rough-and-tumble — some seem to watch way too much TV or have trouble getting their career started if they’re into it too heavily. While alcohol abuse obviously ruins people’s lives and causes much more grief and pain than pot, people who prefer wine or beer or even hard stuff on the rocks in the evening are a little bit more organized and aggressive and down-to-it.

Of course, tea and water and juices and an occasional Lemon Coke (which you can only get in Europe these days) are probably the best libations of all since drinking them to excess won’t hurt you. (I’m boring myself as I write this.) Alcohol and pot have to be absorbed in moderation, and tens of millions obviously have problems with that concept. As Sterling Hayden (who loved to smoke hash) once told me, “The hard thing is to hold that middle ground….hold that middle ground.”

“I enjoyed parts of Grindhouse, although three hours is a long time to watch two directors draw air-quotes around bad moviemaking. Quentin Tarantino is a pretty good writer and a monstrously gifted director, and I’d rather his movies were hits. But I can’t pretend to be disappointed that Grindhouse is stiffing, because creatively it’s a dead end that he’s been traveling toward for a dozen years.” — EW “Final Cut” columnist Mark Harris in a 4.12 posting that repeats the old gripe that by riffing and sampling from movies instead of (horrors!) drawing from personal observation and life experience, Tarantino is a world-class wanker who’s pissing away his potential.

Last Thursday’s tracking got it wrong. Disturbia hasn’t been neck-and-necking (or slightly edging out) Perfect Strangers — it has left that poorly reviewed Bruce Willis-Halle Berry drama in the dust. Disturbia is being projected to do $24,131,000 (2925 theatres, $8200 a print) by Sunday night, while Perfect Stranger will come in fourth with roughly $11,163,000, at $4000 a print.

Blades of Glory will be #2 with $15,442,000, and Meet The Robinsons will be in third place with $12,447,000. Are We Done Yet — the fact that this complete piece-of-shit comedy did $15 million last weekend says something about the taste buds and guillibility of mainstream auds — will come in fifth with $8,801,000. Wild Hogs is sixth with $4,708,000. Redline will be seventh with $4,604,000. Pathfinder will rank eighth with $4,500,000. The Reaping will come in ninth with $4,477,000, and 300 will be tenth with $4,327,000.

Grindhouse,, off 65%, with come in with $4,036,000. The Quentin Tarantino-Robert Rodriguez film is down to $1500 a print, and will start losing theatres next week. The rumble says it cost over $60 million (closer to $70 million, some say) before marketing, and it may end up with $23 or $24 million before petering out — the cume is $19,496,000.

Aqua Teen Hunger Force Colon Movie Film for Theaters will make around $3,626,000, and Slow Burn will take in $800,008,000 — $600 a theatre in 1100 theatres.

Last Wednesday I posted claims from two well-placed sources claiming that Warner Bros. attorneys were trying to keep original Get Smart creators Mel Brooks and Buck Henry from receiving fair compensation fees from the film version. But yesterday AICN’s Harry Knowles reported that “ink went to paper and cash went to banks and Brooks and Henry have been officially signed on as creative consultants on the Get Smart movie with Steve Carrell and Anne Hathaway. In fact, Carrell has already shot one joke scene that Mel Brooks wrote for his character in this film. With more to come, apparently from both Mel and Buck.”