Month: April 2007

Famous people are going to be poked and badgered from time to time about their sexual tastes and proclivities (i.e., by gay media types if they happen to be gay), but it’s their own damn business and if they want to keep it private they’re damn well entitled and should be left alone. I say this having read on Radar Online that Out magazine’s May issue (on sale 4.17) is raising a rude curtain on Anderson Cooper and Jodie Foster, even if there’s not much of a debate about where these two are at.

Would it be a healthier world all around if no one made the slightest attempt to mask their sexuality because doing so would be needless and pointless? Of course, but if a person decides that his/her career will work out better if they keep their cards to their chest, they should be allowed to play it that way.

This is off-topic, but the same goes for those execs in the film industry who’ve had “asshole interventions” — i.e., family and friends sitting them down and telling them they need to make some behavioral adjustments for the general betterment. (A producer of a film I saw recently allegedly went through one of these about eight or nine years ago.) Would you want to be on the cover of some magazine if you (or your wife/husband) had undergone group therapy along these lines? Would you want it known that your personality problems had become so critical that family and friends had to step in and try and fix things?

This is a good reader-response topic. What persons working in or adjacent to the film industry right now could be evaluated to be most in need of an asshole intervention? I know, I know….I’m a candidate, right? But who else? There must be dozens.

Martin Scorsese will handle three tasks as the Cannes Film Festival next month — giving the festival’s Cinema Lesson, handing out the Camera d’Or for Best First Film and officially launching his World Cinema Foundation, but there’s a fourth task he could be doing, and it would make sense if he did. He could be showing his Rolling Stones/”Bigger Bang” concert tour documentary that he began shooting last October (possibly to be called Shine a LIght), and which Paramount Pictures will release later this year.

Of course, the concert doc (which the IMDB says was shot in a letterbox 2.35 to 1 aspect ratio…cool) may be not ready to show at Cannes, and it might turn up at September’s Toronto Film Festival instead (where Scorsese’s last musical- legend doc, Bob Dylan: No Direction Home, had its big debut). A Hollywood Reporter /Reuters story by Stuart Kemp that ran in early February said that Scorsese “is in post-production, working with a team of editors to assemble the film, which also will feature historical and current behind-the-scenes footage and interviews.”

I’m mentioning this Stones-doc possibility only because I’ve agreed with a 2.16.07 prediction by Toronto Star critic Peter Howell that it would show up on the Croisette, and because I reiterated that feeling in a 3.18.07 HE post, and because a couple of people told me afterwards that Scorsese “almost never shows his films at film festivals” or shows up to tout them.

I called two or three people at Paramount this morning to get an idea of what’s going on and nothing came of it. If it was happening they would have to keep mum anyway until the official 4.19 announcement of the Cannes entries.

It’s 9:37 ayem and Are We Done Yet? (Columbia, opening today) has a zero rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Two critics, however — Reel Times’ Mark Pfeiffer and the Orlando Sentinel’s Roger Moore — have included an olive-branch bend-over comment in their reviews, possibly because they hold with Bipedalist‘s view that it’s important for journo-critics to always try to say something nice in order to keep things mellow and respectful.

Pfeiffer said that “this remake of the 1948 RKO comedy Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House is a moderately amusing family film, if not a terribly inspired one.” And Moore said “it’s amusing to watch Ice play straight-man to McGinley’s perky, needy, too-helpful Chuck.” Bluntly, frankly — the word “amusing” in no way repesents any aspect of Are We Done Yet?

Keith Richards has copped to mixing his dad’s ashes with some cocaine and snorting a line of the stuff back in ’02. “He was cremated and I couldn’t resist grinding him up with a little bit of blow…my dad wouldn’t have cared,” Richards told a reporter for NME, the renowned British music rag. “It went down pretty well, and I’m still alive.”

A denial was issued later on, but many of us will probably choose to ignore it.

NME editors wouldn’t be expected to know this, but cremated-remains snorting is actually a common, age-old practice among Southern Baptists and Pentecostals. I’m told that Pat Robertson once explored the ritual in a special documentary produced for the 700 Club.

Reader Marc Gottleib reports that a fire alarm stopped all screenings tonight and forced an evacuation at Hollywood’s Arclight theatre. Gottleib was watching a DVD-launch screening of Payback: Straight Up, and about an hour into the film (right after Mel Gibson is saved from getting castrated on the hood of a car by Lucy Liu and her Asian thugs), the film suddenly stopped and the emergency lights came on. And the next thing we know, everyone was being herded out of the auditorium.

“It turned out that we weren’t the the only ones and the entire Arclight complex was being evacuated with lights out (except for emergency lighting). Alarm klaxons were blaring and strobe lights flickering, and waves of patrons from all the theatres were suddenly outside in the courtyard as firemen moved through the crowd carrying all manner of equipment.

“A half hour went by and there was an announcement that the place may be shut down for the night, but we were welcome to wait to see if the Fire Marshal would declare the theatre safe. Another ten minutes went by before we ended up leaving, and still everything remained dark. The staff looked completely dumbfounded. They did announce all ticket stubs from tonight would be honored for later showings.

“I guess I’ll have to wait for the DVD next week to see how Brian Helgeland‘s intended version of Donald Westlake‘s novel turns out, but for the first hour, the movie was really very good. An absolute marked improvement upon the flaccid Paramount hack job — in this version Ginson is a raging, nasty sonofabitch. He’s no Lee Marvin, but he held his own here.”

The teaser-trailer for Die Hardest….I mean, Live Free or Die Hard (20th Century Fox, 6.27). It’s basically Big John McClane (Bruce Willis) trying to keep “an attack on the U.S. infrastructure from shutting down the entire nation,” blah blah. Same old high-testosterone, Larry Gordon-Joel Silver macho crap from the ’80s in a very slick and freshly-revved package, directed by Len Wiseman (the two Underworld flicks) with some very snazzy CG action effects. Justin Long, Maggie Q, Timothy Olyphant and Jeffrey Wright costar.

Fox 411’s Roger Friedman reported early this morning that Leonardo DiCaprio “is in negotiations to star on Broadway this fall in David Rabe‘s The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel,” a sort of anti-military, anti-Vietnam War piece. If I were Leo I would probably want to angle the play more in the direction of the Iraq conflict, if and when the deal actually happens.

In a review of a 1977 production of the play in New York with Al Pacino in the lead role, Clive Barnes wrote the following:

“[The play] begins and ends with Hummel’s fatal accident in a Vietnamese whorehouse. Yet the structure is, in fact, a web-like continuum in which past and present are intermingled. It is Hummel going through his basic training, in brief, cinematic-style vignettes, but it is also Hummel learning the facts of death in Vietnam as a medical orderly.

“There is no theme except the terrible and basic theme of waste — human waste. Nothing happens except the accidents and incidents of war and training for war. Yet Rabe records and heightens, selects and editorializes, like a war correspondent of God. It is a play beautiful in its shabbiness, proud in the honesty of its despair.

“Timing is everything,” writes Freidman, explaining that DiCaprio “would have to roll into Pavlo Hummel straight from filming Revolutionary Road with Kate Winslet, directed by the actress√ɬ¢√¢‚Äö¬¨√¢‚Äû¬¢ husband, Sam Mendes.”

An alleged Orson Welles “masterpiece” called The Other Side of the Wind could finally reach theaters sometime in ’08, according to legendary director and Sopranos costar Peter Bogdanovich. A deal to edit and complete Wells’ final film “is 99.9% finished,” Bogdanovich said at an appearance at Orlando’s Florida Film Festival last Friday, according to a report on a site dedicated to Welles’s work.

“The Other Side of the Wind tells the story of Jake Hannaford, an aging film director played by John Huston, who is trying to make a film, albeit with great difficulty,” says an essay about the movie on Wellesnet.com. “He is surrounded by flunkies, journalists and wanna-be’s, many of whom are not so subtly patterned after people in Welles’ life.

Bogdanovich is actually a costar in The Other Side of the Wind, playing a char- acter named “Brooks Otterlake.” (An otter that swims in a lake…got it.) Other actors include Oja Kodar, Lilli Palmer, Edmond O’Brien, Mercedes McCambridge, Cameron Mitchell and Paul Stewart.

“There are few more tantalizing stories than those of unfinished films,” the essay says. “When it’s a director of Orson Welles’ stature, the stories only get bigger, the films more legendary.

“Kodar helped Welles with the screenplay, and thanks to her input, the film has a more explicit sexuality than any other film in Welles’ career.

Oda Kodar, Orson Welles

“Judging from the clips made public, the film promises to be Welles’ most radical and experimental work of all, and is sure to put off many. One report even has Oliver Stone claiming the film was too experimental. Welles planned on blending footage of multiple stocks and aspect ratios, which would create a collage effect, and with Welles’ bravura editing on F for Fake, the possibilities are endlessly fascinating for what he could (and did) have achieved with Wind.”

The Taylor Negron–Lily Haydn performance two nights ago at the Egyptian Arena Theatre was so good and eloquent and deeply felt that I needed time to let it sink in before writing about it. Negron is a character actor with a certain flamboyancy (of all his films, my favorite is Gun Shy), but I never detected the touch-of-the-poet side. Because movie and TV roles aren’t about revealing unsuspected depths. Catch an actor in a good play or in a reading of this kind and you suddenly feel that you finally know them.

Taylor Negron (second from right) and admirers — Sunday, 4.1.07, 9:40 pm

Negron has a relaxed and assured writing style and man, can he read! He makes it all feel alive and rapturous and full of pizazz. How many one-person shows have I seen and genuinely enjoyed in my life? Not many — the truth is that I’m lazy and over-worked and always making excuses — but I know it when a live performance is working and paying off.

My first thought after Negron’s show had been running for 20 minutes or so was that it’s good enough — easily good enough — to be either a one-man deal in Los Angeles or New York, or some kind of touring enterprise. It’s way too good to be performed just once and then put away…please.

The show was basically Negron reading five (or was it six?) perfectly sculpted story-poems about certain poignant (or haunting or disturbing or whatever) episodes in his life, and Haydn — a sexy, dark-haired half-pint who wears hot outfits and plays a mean and lusty violin — plus a cellist named Ben Hong and pianist Adam MacDougall providing musical accompaniment — before, between and after the various passages and generally tying it all together.

I felt genuinely aroused and grateful after it was over. I decided I need more theatrical-type fixes in my life. The Negron-Haydn show reminded me that living in this town can be about much, much more than watching cinematic fart-bombs like Are We Done Yet?, and thank God for that.

Film Threat has posted a video file of “Thanks- giving,” Eli Roth‘s Grindhouse parody trailer with that already-famous bit with the cheerleader doing a bouncing strip-tease on a trampoline, etc. Roth is definitely one sick fuck. Where’s the S.S. Nazi trailer as well as the one with Danny Trejo for a bullshit fictional film called “Machete”?

MySpace will hold its own presidential primary on January 1st and 2nd, 2008, prior to any of the regular big-time state primaries (New Hampshire, Iowa, etc.). MySpace president Tom Anderson is being quoted as saying that “Iowa and New Hampshire may be selecting delegates, but the MySpace vote will be the first test of where candidates stand in the election year.” In whatever numbers they vote and whomever they vote for, I’ll bet anyone that the under-30 generation won’t go to the actual November 2008 polls in the same quantity. Because…you know, it’s hard, dude. I’ve got classes and I was up late last night and my boss will freak if I leave work, etc.

Are We Done Yet? (Columbia, 4.4) is a cretinous family comedy about an idiot father (Ice Cube) going through hell as he tries to fix up a huge ramshackle mansion that he’s bought in some far-off Oregon country town while his wife (Nia Long) goes “now, now” and his two totally contemptible asshole kids smirk and giggle as he howls and screams and falls through roofs and gets electrocuted. It’s an African-American Money Pit with fewer brain cells.

Aleisha Allen, Nia Long, Philip Bolden, Ice Cube in Are We Done Yet?

I knew going in that Are We Done Yet? would be a downmarket horror, but I went to see it last night (i.e., at a promotional screening in Culver City) because the makers are claiming that it’s based upon Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House, the sophisticated 1948 Cary Grant-Myrna Loy comedy written by Norman Pan- ama and Melvin Frank, and I wanted to note the similarities. (Would there be a sardonic Melvyn Douglas character who flirts with Long, etc.?)

It turns out there are maybe five or six elements that link this godawful metaphor about the devolution of the human brainpan with the Grant-Loy movie, but they’re so marginal that the Ice Cube flick could just as easily be “based” on Ben-Hur or A Nightmare on Elm Street or Jersey Girl.

To call Are We Done Yet? not funny is like saying that a 12 year-old kid afflicted with Down’s Syndrome probably won’t be hired as a CEO of some Fortune 500 company when he turns 21.

As directed by Steve Carr and written by Hank Nelken, it’s basically about the joy of watching a proverbial dad type put through all kinds of agony and humiliation because he can be something of an arrogant fool. I recognize that the term “family comedy” these days means “comedy aimed at obese 10 year-olds with huge monthly cell-phone bills who are having trouble graduating from the fourth grade,” but there is nothing — zilch — in this movie that rings any kind of truth bell. It is haphazard idiot bullshit from start to finish.

Cary Grant (r.), Myrna Loy (center) in Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House

I’m sorry to be the pain-in-the-ass sorehead, but nothing in a comedy is funny unless you recognize some aspect of a personal experience (or that of a family member or close friend) in the gags or the writing. The story has to faintly resem- ble life as it is actually experienced outside the walls of a megaplex in order for anyone of any intelligence to laugh at the twists and turns and pratfalls. Otherwise, it’s just crap being thrown at the wall.

And Are We Done Yet? isn’t even a good Tom & Jerry cartoon. The adventures of Wiley Coyote and the Road Runner are like a Tom Stoppard play compared to this.

Hostility towards damn-fool dads isn’t the whole thematic ballgame. Are We Done Yet? is also about local yokels flim-flamming the city slicker and picking his pockets. It’s also about the fear and loathing of nature. All of the CG-enhanced animals in this film are hostile and predatory and bare their fangs. The underlying message is basically that you don’t want to get close to nature. Just stay safe and chillin’ in your bedroom with your universal remote and your i-Pod and your unlaced homie shoes and you be fine.

The work and money particulars are mind-bending. Ice Cube’s character has some money because he sold his share in some kind of Portland bar/restaurant. As the film begins he’s not only supporting Long and her kids with this nest egg but also funding a start-up sports magazine (not an online thing but an actual paper-and-ink thing). The start-up alone is a hugely expensive proposition. Magazine often take two or three years to show a profit. But we don’t want to deal with any of this because we’re just making a stupid movie and nobody gives a damn.

Nonetheless, Ice is also able to afford the fixer-upper that causes all the pain — a massive 19th Century lakeside mansion with all kinds of acreage and a second cottage on the grounds. It’s probably located less than an hour from their former home in Portland because Ice Cube would have to commute there frequently in order to afford to publish his new sports magazine and manage his staff, but even in the far-out boonies the house would have to cost, bare minimum, $750 grand (and probably a lot more). So the guy has to be holding at least a million liquid, and yet he balks at paying a local shyster electrician $8 grand for a re-wiring of the house.

You sit there staring at the screen and you feel dead inside, and then you feel poisoned and you realize you’ve been reborn except you’re losing your mind. Ice Cube got paid a lot of money for doing this thing but you’re just sitting there.

25 or more years ago Andrew Sarris wrote that “the bottom has fallen out of badness in movies.” Now the roof is gone also and the walls have collapsed, and makers of mainstream family comedies have thrown in the towel and said “if it makes money, we don’t care!…the family-audience laser-brains out there loved Are We There Yet? so what do you want us to do…not make more money?” And so the movies they’re making radiate a terrible odiousness…a kind of soul-rupturing stupidity…not just unfunny but suffocating in ways you wouldn’t think possible.

If I were the corpse of either Norman Panama or Melvin Frank, I would crack open my coffin, claw my way up through the dirt like Uma Thurman did in Kill Bill, and then walk zombie-style through Beverly Hills in the wee hours of the night until I found the homes of Joe Roth, whose Revolution Pictures produced this thing, and Are We Done Yet? producer Todd Garner. What I would do next is best imagined instead of described.