Month: August 2007

You’d have to be a damn fool journalist to walk into a room with Tommy Lee Jones without knowing that he doesn’t suffer fools. He just doesn’t like to piss around, or so I’ve been told. He’ll talk professional fundamentals — work, focus, creative decisions he’s made — but he feels that politics is personal, and that personal stuff is too personal for words. Jones sometimes looks like he’s studying you, and half the time like you’ve just asked something pretty dumb. I was a little intimidated, to be honest.

In The Valley of Elah star Tommy Lee Jones at Four Seasons hotel in Beverly Hills — Saturday, 8.25.07, 11:45 am; bigger portrait shot.

But he does listen carefully and responds with at least a portion of his enormous intelligence. I know the stories about him, but he’s my idea of a decent guy. Plus he had a nice suit on with a beautiful pair of black Italian lace-up shoes.

The real bottom line is that Jones is unpretentious and frank and as straight as they come, and right now he’s the quintessential soul man — the mythical older Texas guy with creases in his face and all kinds of regret and guilt in his eyes — of American cinema right now. The proof is in his performances in In The Valley of Elah and No Country for Old Men. Here’s our ten or eleven-minute chat.

Charles Mudede, a dispenser of tight, clean sentences and un-minced thoughts, has written a short unambiguous piece for The Stranger, “Seattle’s only newspaper,” about what a misanthropic hard-case Stanley Kubrick was.

“Kubrick hated humans,” Mudede begins. “This hate for his own kind is the ground upon which his cinema stands. As is made apparent by 2001: A Space Odyssey, his contempt was deep.

“It went from the elegant surface of our space-faring civilization down, down, down to the bottom of our natures, the muck and mud of our animal instincts, our ape bodies, our hair, guts, hunger, and grunts. No matter how far we go into the future, into space, toward the stars, we will never break with our first and violent world. Even the robots we create, our marvelous machines, are limited (and undone) by our human emotions, pressures, primitive drives. For Kubrick, we have never been modern.

“‘I’m in a world of shit,’ says Private Joker at the end of Kubrick’s unremittingly dark Vietnam War film, Full Metal Jacket. That is what Kubrick has to say about the state of everything: The world is shit, humans are shit in shit, life is worth shit, and there is nothing else that can be done about the situation. In Kubrick’s movies, progress, sustained enlightenment, and moral improvement are impossible because the powers of reason, love, and religion are much weaker than the forces of generation and degeneration, desire and destruction, sex and death.”

Kirk Douglas, who worked with Kubrick on Paths of Glory and Spartacus, once described him as “Stanley the prick.” He wasn’t referring to the misanthropy, and he conveyed this opinion with a smirk. But I’ve never forgotten the moment when he said this, which was late in the afternoon as we stood outside Elaine’s sometime in the late summer of 1982, just as a Bobby Zarem press party for Eddie Macon’s Run, in which Douglas costarred, was breaking up.

In an 8.26 N.Y. Times essay about Norman Mailer‘s Maidstone, Gerald Howard reports that the legendary film critic Pauline Kael once called Mailer‘s Wild 90 “the worst movie that I’ve ever stayed to see all the way through.” Thus, Kael implied, she’d walked out on other bad movies with at least some regularity. (I remember reading a long time ago about her walking out on Raise the Titanic, muttering “life is too short.”) There will be those who will say “no, this does not bestow a respectable distinction to walking out on stinkers as a general practice,” and that is their right as American citizens.

“There may be an underlying notion of Hollywood as a tool of a cultural imperialism that, however murkily, reflects the actual imperialism of U.S. foreign policy. Follow that logic far enough and Hollywood flicks aren’t just dopey time-killers — but sermons straight from the bully pulpit.” — from an 8.24 Guardian piece by Danny Leigh titled “Is Hollywood America?”

A barbed, X-Acto knife review of Justin Theroux‘s Dedication (Weinstein Co., expanding 9.14) came yesterday from N.Y. Times reviewer Jeanette Catsoulis, with a brilliant opening graph that touches on the relatively new movie-plot phenomenon of genetically impaired low-tide males winding up for no earthly reason with hotties who would never give them a second glance in real life.

Billy Crudup, Mandy Moore in Justin Theroux’s Dedication

“That weird exhalation you hear at the multiplex these days is the sound of female characters settling for less than they deserve,” Catasoulis writes. “Following on the wildly successful anti-feminist heels of Knocked Up, Hollywood is falling over itself to introduce beautiful, smart young women to useless, possibly brain-damaged young men. Regular bathers need not apply.”

Seth Rogen bedding and developing a fruitful relationship with Katherine Heigl in Knocked Up. Jonah Hill ending up in a possibly promising relationship with Emma Stone‘s “Jules” at the end of Superbad. Dane Cook, a very convincing animal-sociopath in Mr. Brooks and a guy who’s exuded a kind of frazzled dork quality all along, romantically pairing off with “penguinologist” Jessica Alba in the forthcoming Good Luck Chuck. Will Ferrell ending up with Maggie Gyllenhaal in Stranger Than Fiction. Any others?

These quizzical pairings are happening because the director-producer-writers behind these films obviously want to see inappropriate guys hooking up with saucy attractive women. One reason is that it’s pleasing to slovenly dorky guys to think that hotties will fall for them under the right circumstances Another is that Judd Apatow, who doesn’t see himself as a Cary Grant type, has a very pretty wife.

I also think these pairings reflect current sociology to some degree. I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve seen extremely foxy younger women walking down supermarket aisles with guys who, by my standards, are far, far below them in terms of attractiveness. There’s nothing wrong with a guy being 157 miles away from being GQ cover material, but when he’s paired off with a girl who’s an 8.5 or a 9, something’s weird. You know the kind of guy I mean…thirtysomethings shuffling around in cutoffs and sandals (with funny-looking unpedicured toes) and squiggly man-beards and bodies that haven’t seen a gym in a good ten years.

The apparent promise of Tony Award-winning actor Dan Fogler playing another dregs-of-the-gene-pool guy in Good Luck, Chuck certainly gives pause. Particularly on the heels of what appears (to judge by the trailer) to be a relentlessly slovenly Fogler performance in the reportedly “awful” Balls of Fury. And yet there’s an intriguing role on the horizon — Fogler as a young Alfred Hitchcock in a comedic thriller called Number 13.

I was wrong in predicting a north-of-$20 million figure for Superbad‘s second weekend, although it’s still far and away the weekend’s Big Kahuna. The Greg Mottola-Judd Apatow-Seth Rogen-Jonah Hill-Michael Cera-Christopher Mintz-Passe comedy did about $5,675,000 million yesterday and with a projected $18,735,000 Sunday-night cume (Fantasy Moguls’ Steve Mason is predicting $15.5 million) for an estimated 53% and a ten-day total of just under $70 million. It will pass $100 million within two weeks.

The Bourne Ultimatum will be second with $12,088,000, and Rush Hour 3 will come in third with $11,195,000. Mr. Bean’s Holiday — the #1 newbie — will come in fourth with $10,025,000. War, the Jet Li-Jason Staham actioner, will be fifth with $7,834,000. The Nanny Diaries, another Weinstein Co. disappointment, will be sixth with $7,834,000. The Simpsons Movie — still selling tickets — with be seventh with $4,373,000. Stardust is eighth with a weekend tally of $3,859,000, followed by Hairspray with $3,548,000 and The Invasion coming in tenth with $3,026,000.

I feel badly for Rod Lurie with Resurrecting The Champ projected to come in eleventh with only $538,000 yesterday and about $1.5 millon for the weekend, give or take.

A Lexus SUV driven by producer-director John Singleton struck and killed a female jaywalker late Thursday night, according to a news report posted at 11:40 pm Friday night. No drugs or alcohol involved, said Jason Lee, a police spokesperson. The accident happened in L.A.’s Jefferson Park neighborhood. The victim, Constance Hall, was 57 years old.

A ten-minute tribute reel in honor of Daniel Day Lewis‘s film career — a reel that will include unseen footage from Paul Thomas Anderson‘s There Will Be Blood (Paramount Vantage, 12.25) — will, I’m hearing from a good source, be shown at the Telluride Film Festival the weekend after next. This info contradicts another source who’s heard that a 40-minute Blood reel will play there, and still another claiming that Blood will screen in its entirety.

“They were talking about [showing a portion of the film] for a Daniel Day Lewis tribute, I know that, but the festival was begging for the whole film to be shown but it’s just not ready yet,” a source remarked. A Paramount Vantage spokesperson said nothing was on the table or suitable for comment.

If — I say “if” — a longish Blood reel is shown, it will be like those product-reel showings of Gangs of New York, Lord of the Rings and World Trade Center at Cannes, and therefore the first time that Telluride — the most pure-minded, far- from-the-madding-crowd film festival around — will have screened a portion of a film solely to spread word-of-mouth to benefit a distributor.

But if just a DDL tribute reel is shown, it’ll be nothing big because Telluride, a regular tells me, “has tributed other visiting actors with reels before.”

A slightly more engrossing, more detailed trailer for Ridley Scott‘s American Gangster (Universal, 11.2) than the one I ran on 8.11. The previous one was pretty much all about Denzel Washington‘s heroin dealer character — this new one gives more dialogue clips to DW nemesis Russell Crowe. The period crime film will begin to screen for elite media just after everyone gets back from Toronto.

“If you want to see a lot of people naked, see this film,” a producer friend said this afternon about Robert Benton‘s Feast of Love (MGM, 9.28). I’ve managed to miss this so far (42 West has only invited me to Manhattan screenings). But honestly? Nudity always raises interest levels. Any guy, straight or gay, who tells you it doesn’t is a liar.

Morgan Freeman, Gregg Kinnear

The actors who don’t take their clothes off in this relationship dramedy are Morgan Freeman, Jane Alexander, Fred Ward and, the producer said, Selma Balir. (She’s apparently wrong about Blair.) The actors who do get naked (full-frontally or partially) are Radha Mitchell (big-time), Greg Kinnear (partial), Toby Hemingway, Alexa Davalos, Billy Burke and (the producer wasn’t entirely certain about the next three, but she says there’s definitely nudity among lesbians) Shannon Lucio, Erika Marozsan and Stana Katic.

Feast of Tits….I like that title.

The spirit of any Wes Anderson film can be found in his choice of pop-music tracks, and the relentlessly insipid USA Today columnist Whitney Matheson (a.k.a. “Pop Candy”) has listed some of the tracks in The Darjeeling Limited (Fox Searchlight, 9.29), and the emphasis is definitely on…the Kinks!

The three Kinks tunes are “This Time Tomorrow,” “Strangers” and “Powerman.” There’s also the Rolling Stones‘ “Play With Fire,” Joe Dassin‘s “Champs Elysees” and Peter Sarstedt‘s “Where Do You Go to (My Lovely).” Anderson “also throws in several classical tracks, like Debussy’s Clair De Lune and Beethoven’s Symphony No. 7 in A, Op. 92,” Matheson reports.