Day: July 30, 2007

Agreed — Josh Hartnett gives an exceptional, above-average performance in Resurrecting The Champ (Yari Film Group, 8.24). He plays an ambitious sports writer…I don’t want to get into this just yet. (Tomorrow, the next day…it’s a good film and all in good time.) What I asked Hartnett about instead was an earlier performance — the best he’s ever given, if you ask me — in a movie that very few people saw called Mozart and the Whale.

Resurrecting the Champ star Josh Hartnett in 12th floor suite in the Four Seasons hotel — Monday, 7.30.07, 3:40 pm

I didn’t actually see it myself. I saw a sweetened-up version that the producers recut, which they called Crazy in Love in some markets. The real version by director Petter Naess has never been released, and I wanted to know if DVD viewers might one day get a chance to see it.
Here’s how Hartnett explained the blow-by-blow. Here’s the back-story of this film as it’s been told to me, but Hartnett tells it better.
I saw the recut, slightly cheerier version of Mozart and the Whale at the 2006 Santa Barbara Film Festival, and here’s my original review. I liked it even though it was “wrong” version, so I’m figuring the “right” version will be even better.
I called it “a Rain Man-type love story with a jumpy heart…jumpy as in child-like, energetic, anxious.”
Hartnett played a character based on a real-life guy named Jerry Newport who’s afflicted with with Asperger’s Syndrome, which is a highly functional form of autism.

“A romanticized, tidied-up version of a complicated real-life love story, Mozart and the Whale is about a youngish couple (Hartnett, Radha Mitchell) with Asperger’s Syndrome,” I wrote. “And this, viewing-wise, is nervy and provocative in more ways than one.
“It’s not calming or swoony like other love stories because the lovers are always in a fairly hyper and unsettled state, which feels a bit challenging, but it seems real and fairly honest and is obviously on a wavelength all its own.
At first you’re thinking it needs a regular-guy character (like Tom Cruise‘s selfish prick in Rainman) to provide stability and perspective, but then you get used to the manic energy of it.”

Will Elizabeth Guider, a smart Variety veteran, being named editor of The Hollywood Reporter (effectively replacing the departed Cynthia Littleton) make any difference in the fortunes of the second trade? This sorta feels like a status-quo, within-the-perimeter move. Not bold or radical enough to keep Reporter revenues from…I was going to say “sliding even further in this, a declining marketplace for print.” Put it this way: does anyone think the Guider hire is likely to improve matters? Not in the view of Deadline Hollywood Daily‘s Nikki Finke, who filed this story late Monday morning.

To judge by his lean appearance, Robert De Niro was several years younger when he filmed this promo spot on behalf of the Tribeca Film Festival. It’s for some kind of profile of the festival that was destined to appear “Tuesday on Fox,” as De Niro says. The funny…no, hilarious part comes when the off-camera director asks him to sell it “with a little more energy” and De Niro goes, “I’m sorry but that was energetic….you don’t know what you’re talking about…sorry…I’m not selling cars, okay?” (Posted recently or six months ago — don’t know the story — on GorillaMask.net.)

An excerpt from a Dick Cavett interview with Ingmar Bergman on a show that originally aired August 2, 1971. Key quote: “It is absolutely impossible for me to work with a producer who would try to tell me what to do. If he tries, I would ask him to go to hell.” Here’s a second excerpt with Persona costar Bibi Andersson taking part.

Judd Apatow and Greg Mottola‘s Superbad, easily the sharpest and funniest teen-sex comedy in ages, has an issue of concern. New tracking is in and it’s not doing all that well — 26, 25 and 1. For a film that’s opening in two and a half weeks — Friday, 8.17 — that’s not awful (things can change) but the marketers have to start scrambling. The film clearly sells itself, so Sony should sneak it this weekend. The trailer plays nicely, but it doesn’t really convey how above-par exceptional this film is.
The Bourne Ultimatum, opening this weekend, is running at 91, 56 and 28 — figure a three-day tally in the $70 to $80 million range. Bratz is 46, 13 and somewhere between 0 and 1. El Cantante is at 46, 16 and 3. Hot Rod — 62, 25 and 2. Among the new releases, Underdog — 80,16 and 3 — will probably be the #2 film after Bourne. Rush Hour, opening the weekend after next, looks very good but not explosive — 80, 45 and 9.

The rule-of-three once again applies: French actor Michel Serrault, best known for his role as Zaza in La Cage aux Folles, has died of cancer at age 79.

A South Park episode I happened to catch last night called “Make Love, Not Warcraft” was laugh-out-loud funny and flat-out brilliant. The site says it’s been nominated for a primetime Emmy, which is no surprise. This is one of the most perceptive and subversive takes on the psychology and emotional babycake lives of hard-core gamers I’ve ever seen. I don’t laugh out loud all that much, but I did last night.

This 1964 Bruce Lee interview (which I happened upon this morning on nerve.com) is worth watching for Lee’s expression when he mentions that he majored in philosophy in college. He hesitates for a brief instant before admitting this, and his eyes flick to the side just after.

Tom Snyder cracks have been de rigeur since the ’70s when Dan Aykroyd began spoofing him on SNL, but Snyder — who died yesterday from lukemia at age 71 — always had my absolute respect for a single interview he did with Sterling Hayden in, I think, 1977 or thereabouts.
That interview, which ought to be on You Tube or at least on DVD, felt to me like one of the greatest TV chats I’d ever seen because it was so nakedly confessional. I knew Hayden slightly in the late ’70s to early ’80s — he was my first movie-star interview (i.e., on the set of Frank Pierson‘s King of the Gypsies) and he lived in my hometown of Wilton, Connecticut — and so I recognized to some extent how candid he was being with Snyder. I especially remember Hayden saying on that late-night show how “booze really sneaks up on you” and “you’re always a little bit drunker than you think you are.”
Snyder, in any event, was good enough to not get in Hayden’s way — he mostly just guided him along and let him rip.
I last spoke with Snyder when he dropped by the offices of Entertainment Weekly around ’93 or ’94 and hosted a big lunch with a group of staffers (bureau chief Cable Neuhaus) and freelancers. Snyder wanted to pick our brains and put his ear a little bit closer to the rails. I respected him for that also.

That hooded, black-robed figure with the stern expression and almost Kabuki-white face paid a visit to Ingmar Bergman‘s home on the island of Faro last weekend (or certainly within the last few days). I like to think he would have been polite about it and knocked on the front door, but one way or the other he sat by the bed and took the one of the four or five greatest film directors of the 20th Century by the hand, and that was more or less that — a final transition and fade to black.

The man was a genius, a God…a deliverer of pure, chilly clarity in a muddled and equivocating world. His work was astounding, penetrating, devastating. Ingmar Bergman made me feel better about being an occasional misanthrope and down- head and a sometime depressive than any other artist I’ve ever encountered. And when they were in the mood, Bergman and his cinematographer Sven Nykvist had no equals at conveying subtle but heated eroticism.
The slightly discomforting thought is that Bergman’s greatest films (the ones he made from the mid ’50s to mid ’70s) and in fact the very idea of Bergman himself — a filmmaker whose material often came from the deepest gloom-pits of his soul, who didn’t fill a room with light as much as focus on an intimate, small-room situ- ation with a kind of blue-flame intensity, and who adhered to a visual language that was often somber and austere — has been regarded as a yesteryear thing for a long time now.
I wonder how many under-35s have even seen a Bergman film. The Bergman art- house aesthetic of the ’50s and ’60s is about as far from the Tarantino film-geek attitude as you can get. Film Snob Dictionary authors Martin Kamp and Law- rence Levi wrote a couple of years ago that “watching a Bergman film is so PBS tote-bag, so Mom-and-Dad-on-a-date-in-college, so baguettes-and-Chardonnay.”
Jett, 19, knows who Bergman is (he first heard his name and rep in that passage from Manhattan when Diane Keaton‘s character calls him over-rated) but he’s never seen a single one of his films. I’m going to try and persuade him to sit down and watch a Criterion DVD of The Silence or Through a Glass Darkly or Shame sometime later this week.