Month: August 2007

So there’s this 8.26 New Zealand Herald piece about Peter Jackson‘s Crossing the Line, a 15-minute World War I movie that was shot last April in just a few days. Fine — soldiers in a trench, guys yelling orders, fixed bayonets, biplanes, machine guns….”yaaahhhh!”

But the article doesn’t make clear what it is exactly that makes Jim Jannard‘s “Red One” — used by Jackson for his short — all that unique. Red One’s big selling point is that it has an advanced sensor chip, called a Mysterium and selling for about $25,000 each, which is said to produce quality that is “better than film.” Says who? Better in what way? How does it compare to the Viper and the Genesis, and in what specific ways?

I sat down for lunch yesterday with Shoot ‘Em Up director-writer Michael Davis, and the restaurant — the Boulevard Lounge at the Beverly Wilshire hotel — was so clattery and wallah-wallah that my Olympus digital recorder was overwhelmed. (I’m constitutionally incapable of buying one of those clip-mikes that discriminates against ambient noise.) But at least I got a free lunch out of it, and a chance to talk again with Davis — a genuinely nice guy, and a Steven Spielberg look-alike if I ever saw one — about the whole up-and-down.

Shoot Em Up director-writer Michael Davis at Boulevard — Monday, 8.27.07, 2:15 pm

Listen to clip #1, clip #2 and clip #3 if you want, but they’re a chore. I can’t think of anything all that new to say about Davis or the film. I wrote two years ago about his background and how get came to direct Shoot “Em Up, and I’ve raved about the film — “a brilliant, ultra-violent Buster Keaton comedy.” Maybe a new thought is preparing to push through or maybe that’s all she wrote.

Davis’s suitcase-load of action DVDs

Davis’s most impassioned statement was to bring a suitcase full of action-movie DVDs in order to prove his devotion to the genre and to disprove my opinion, expressed in this 8.11 review, that “there isn’t a single drop of sincerity in Shoot ‘Em Up” and that Davis’s “basic attitude is one of laughing derision for the whole Woo-aping circus.” Okay, all right — he’s a genuine action-movie fan but I didn’t feel this when I watched Shoot “Em Up, which is one reason why I enjoyed the film as much as I did. I still say “never trust the artist — trust the tale.”

Variety columnist and reporter Anne Thompson broke a bone in her foot last weekend and subsequently won’t make the trek to either the Telluride or Toronto film festivals.

“The exhibition situation has changed far more dramatically than the audience or the films themselves,” ThinkFilm’s Mark Urman has told Village Voice reporter Anthony Kaufman. “Manhattan is scandalously under-screened, and the rate at which theaters playing specialty films are renovated and created is far behind the rate they’ve been dying. I’ve had films thrown out of theaters making $8,000 to $9,000 in a weekend…and that’s heartbreaking.” As Kaufman reports, $8 to $9 grand “is a sizable gross, in line with Hairspray‘s stellar opening-weekend per-theater average. “

Presumably someone out there has a recent draft of Mikko Alanne‘s script of Pinkville, which director Oliver Stone will make into a film sometime early next year for United Artists. It seems like an astute move for Stone to not only revisit his own Vietnam combat experience as well as the turf of Platoon, his greatest screen triumph, but to also reflect on the Iraq War experience by looking back at another time when U.S. troops were frequently seen as the bad guys when it came to dealings with civilians.

I realize that Pinkville will not be focusing on William Calley, the Army Lieutenant who became a poster boy for G.I. atrocity-committers during the Vietnam War after news of the My Lai massacre — the slaughter by U.S. troops of 500 villagers, many of them women, children and elderly in March of 1968 — broke through. But I wonder to what degree, if any, it will include him in the scenario.

Calley, 64, is apparently retired and now lives in Atlanta, after a lifetime of working at a jewlery store in Columbus, Georgia. He will of course have to go through the whole magilla all over again once the film comes out.

Michael Fleming‘s Variety story says the focus will mainly be on a good-guy whistle-blower — General William Peers (Bruce Willis), who spearheaded the investigation of the 1968 My Lai massacre. Peers took heat from trying to get at the truth when most of the military establishment wanted it to just go away fast, especially after President Richard Nixon, looking to kowtow to the blue-collar, construction-worker, pro-Vietnam War voters, announced that he would personally review the Calley court-martial situation before any sentence was passed.

There’s a scene in Platoon, of course, in which some of the angrier and more belligerent troops (two fo them played by Tom Berenger and Kevin Dillon), furious over the death of comrades, terrorize and come close to killing several villagers before everything is stopped by Willem Dafoe‘s Sgt. Elias.

Channing Tatum “will play Hugh Thompson, a helicopter pilot who, upon realizing what was happening below, put a stop to the killing by placing his craft between gunmen and the few villagers who were left, and telling his two shipmates to fire on the soldiers if they shot any more people,” Fleming reports. “They airlifted the survivors and reported the carnage to superiors.”

Presumably Seymour Hersh, the reporter who broke the My Lai story in late 1969, will be a character also.

At his court-martial, Calley “testified that he was ordered by Captain Ernest Medina to kill everyone in the village of My Lai. Still, there was only enough photographic and recorded evidence to convict Calley, alone, of murder. He was sentenced to life in prison, but was released in 1974, following many appeals. After being issued a dishonorable discharge, Calley entered the insurance business.”

The little kid to the left of Calley on the Esquire cover, the one with the expression that sort of says “the idea behind this photograph is kinda sick”? I wonder where he is today. I’d like to know if he deliberately conveyed that expression for the Esquire photographer, or whether it just happened.

Variety‘s Tatiana Siegel has reported that four Owen Wilson movies — one now being filmed, one due to shoot in January, and two others pending release — have obviously been affected by last Sunday’s suicide attempt by the 38 year-old actor, and particularly by news reports about same.

Wilson was expected to show up in Hawaii to start work on DreamWorks’ Tropic Thunder, which costars Ben Stiller, Bill Hader and Jack Black, and then shoot a comedy in January with Jennifer Aniston called Marley & Me. Studio spokespersons didn’t say anything about anything when Siegel asked if Wilson would still be acting in these films.

The Wilson tragedy may or may not affect the marketing on Wes Anderson‘s The Darjeeling Limited, which Fox Searchlight is opening on 9.28, but Siegel believes that Paramount’s marketing of Drillbit Taylor, a comedy that opens next March with Wilsonin the title role, has “an even bigger problem” because of the Judd Apatow-produced film’s young-male demographic. What…young guys are especially susceptible to being upset and turned off about Hollywood suicide attempts? Wouldn’t it be more of a case of audiences in general not being as inclined to laugh and kick back with Taylor because of this sad event?

Extra reported yesterday and today that it was Luke Wilson, Owen’s successful actor bother, who found him and called for an ambulance last Sunday. (Extra reporters “obtained the Calls for Service report from the Santa Monica Police Department, which lists the reason for the 911 call from Owen Wilson’s house as an ‘attempted suicide.'”)

I’ve never heard or read that Luke lives with Owen in his Santa Monica home, but if they do in fact live separately (as I’m given to understand) it seems awfully fortuitous that Luke just happened to come over just as Owen was succumbing to the effects of a slashed wrist and a pill overdose. It would certainly have been odd if Luke had been at the home before or during Owen’s suicide attempt. (Would you try to off yourself while your brother is in the house making scrambled eggs or watching the tube or catching zees in the guest room?) Any way you slice it, Luke being there for whatever reason was a pretty lucky break for his brother.

Two more sets of advance Toronto Film Festival Canadian-journo press screenings have been cancelled by Alliance Atlantis, the distributor that cancelled advance screenings last week of Todd Haynes‘ I’m Not There. Screenings of Ang Lee‘s highly anticipated Lust, Caution have been deep-sixed along with early-bird showings of Kevin Macdonald‘s My Enemy’s Enemy. The excuse, as before, is “print availability.” There’s a chance that Lust, Caution showings might be rescheduled for Wednesday, 9.5, but this sounds “awfully iffy” to one local guy.

“This is the [highest] number of high-profile cancellations I can recall for the pre-TIFF screenings,” he comments. “Are studio trying to dodge the bloggers, fearful of critical reaction, or trying to maximize the impact of reactions to these films out of Telluride and Venice?”

One good thing has come out of this — I had forgotten to put McDonald’s film on my list of must-sees, and now that oversight has been corrected.

I was reminded after seeing the B’way revival of Sweeney Todd last year (the one with Patti Lupone as Mrs. Lovett) what a great uptown show it is — great Lupone, magnificent staging, a beautiful Stephen Sondheim score, sad-tragic theme. And then I asked myself, how would this musical play with Helena Bonham Carter in the Lovett role (which was first created by a magnificent Angela Lansbury) in a feverishly Tim Burton -ized film adaptation? (I’m being told Bonham-Carter does her own singing, which sounds problematic.)

Sweeney Todd is a very high-end thing full of operatic passion, but deep down it’s a chilly-atmosphere piece about a revenge-obsessed, throat-slitting barber (read the Wikipedia synopsis). This obviously makes it a different animal than your standard rube musical (i.e., Mamma Mia, Hairspray, Jersey Boys, etc.) that tends to play best with the people who go to movies just looking for tasty popcorn and a good time.

And I’m wondering in this context what the decision to break Burton’s Sweeney Todd wide on 12.21 really means. WB execs are obviously betting they can make more money with a faster limited-wide break (1500 screens) that sells the Sweeney sizzle rather than a gradual roll-out that promises quality and prestige and leans upon word-of-mouth.

McLintock has written that Burton and Sweeney producer Dick Zanuck already had been pushing for a wide bow, expressing concerns that a platform release could give the impression it was an arthouse title.

The whole grand guignol arterial-spurt element will almost certainly feed the fire of Burton’s love for precise and ultra-luscious visual composition. You know Burton — he’s going to go for the oozey-ness of Sweeney Todd and then some. This seems to support the statement by McLintock that Sweeney Todd is “expected to receive an R rating.”

But there’s also an alleged Daily Mail story (can’t find the original link) that’s been quoted on slashfilm.com, saying that the powers-that-be want Burton to “butcher” his own film. “Apparently the early footage from the film was so extremely bloody that the studio executives have become a tad squeamish and are requesting the film to be re-cut,” the story says.

“Tim’s not happy that the studio is asking for so many cuts to the cutting, as it were,” a source has allegedly told a Daily Mail reporter. “The thing is, the studio really likes the film and they want to make it accessible to as big an audience as possible,which means stemming the blood flow. But that’s a bit difficult for a story involving a guy who gets high slitting throats.”

All the big film festivals are front-loaded. The first five or six days always seem to comprise 85% or 90% of the ballgame. Not to complain and par for the course, but the first weekend of the Toronto Film Festival — Friday, 9.7 to Sunday, 9.9 — is fairly jammed with parties. Saturday stands out with three big ‘uns happening almost simultaneously. A No Country for Old Men dinner party and the annual Sony Pictures Classics party at Michelle’s Brasserie starting at 8 pm, and then the doors opening for a Fox Searchlight party for Juno, The Savages and Under The Same Moon at 8:30 pm. Too many balls in the air.

“In real life people step over homeless people, and they’re certainly not going to pay ten bucks to see a movie about one.” — An actor who shall be nameless explaining why Resurrecting The Champ, about a sports writer (Josh Hartnett) who writes a big story about having discovered a former champion boxer from the 1950s (Samuel L. Jackson) who’s since become a scuzzy homeless bum with a “whinny” voice, died last weekend at the box-office.

“Hollywood is not just running out of new ideas — it’s running out of old ideas.” Who said this? Obviously applies to the here-and-now. Can’t find the source online.

The interesting thing isn’t Keanu Reeves being cast as “Klaatu,” a sophisticated, well-spoken alien who brings a dire warning to everyone on earth in a “re-imagining” of the 1951 sci-fi classic The Day the Earth Stood Still. The interesting thing is Variety‘s Michael Fleming reporting that producer Erwin Stoff and 20th Century Fox are envisioning a series of Reeves /Klaatu films — i.e., a “tentpole” opportunity.

Keanu Reeves, Michael Rennie

From Michael Rennie to Keanu Reeves — a clear-cut example of cultural devolution. Klaatu barada whoa.

Reeves “committed over the weekend to play Klaatu, a humanoid alien who arrives on Earth accompanied by an indestructible, heavily armed robot,” Fleming reported, “[along with a] warning to world leaders that their continued aggression will lead to annihilation by species watching from afar. The 1951 film’s premise, a response to the rise of the Cold War after WWII, is being updated, and the film will use advances in visual effects.”

So how do you keep this going as a tentpoler? Reeves/Klaatu delivering warning after warning and getting more and more pissed when humans ignore him? Reeves/Klaatu falling in love and deciding to stay on earth and taking up permanent residence in suburban Virginia? Klaatu running for President, starting a business…? Every continuing scenario idea sounds ridiculous. It’s a single, stand-alone film — Klaatu warns earth to shape up or else…that’s it.

Scott Derrickson (The Exorcism of Emily Rose) directing from a script by David Scarpa. Pic will either start shooting in the late fall or early 2008.