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Hollywood Elsewhere - Movie news and opinions by Jeffrey Wells

“There’s Hollywood Elsewhere and then there’s everything else. It’s your neighborhood dive where you get the ugly truth, a good laugh and a damn good scotch.”
–JJ Abrams
(Star Wars: The Force Awakens, Super 8)

“Smart, reliable and way ahead of the curve … a must and invaluable read.”
–Peter Biskind
(Down and Dirty Pictures Easy Riders, Raging Bulls)

“He writes with an element that any good filmmaker employs and any moviegoer uses to fully appreciate the art of film – the heart.”
–Alejandro G. Inarritu
(The Revenant, Birdman, Amores Perros)

“Nothing comes close to HE for truthfulness, audacity, and one-eyed passion and insight.”
–Phillip Noyce
(Salt, Clear and Present Danger, Rabbit-Proof Fence, Dead Calm)

“A rarity and a gem … Hollywood Elsewhere is the first thing I go to every morning.”
–Ann Hornaday
Washington Post

“Jeffrey Wells isn’t kidding around. Well, he does kid around, but mostly he just loves movies.”
–Cameron Crowe
(Almost Famous, Jerry Maguire, Vanilla Sky)

“In a world of insincere blurbs and fluff pieces, Jeff has a truly personal voice and tells it like it is. Exactly like it is, like it or not.”
–Guillermo del Toro
(Pan’s Labyrinth, Cronos, Hellboy)

“It’s clearly apparent he doesn’t give a shit what the Powers that Be think, and that’s a good thing.”
–Jonathan Hensleigh
Director (The Punisher), Writer (Armageddon, The Rock)

“So when I said I’d like to leave my cowboy hat there, I was obviously saying (in my head at least) that I’d be back to stay the following year … simple and quite clear all around.”
–Jeffrey Wells, HE, January ’09

“If you’re in a movie that doesn’t work, game over and adios muchachos — no amount of star-charisma can save it.”
–Jeffrey Wells, HE

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12 Comments
Vantiy Fair, DVDs

A few days ago N.Y. Times DVD columnist Dave Kehr suckered me into buying the just-released DVD of Stanley Donen‘s Funny Face. I hate glossy-synthetic ’50s musicals — I’ve known that for years– and yet I allowed the smooth-talking, snake-oil-selling Kehr to lead me down the garden path.

This is the second time I’ve bought a disc based on a Kehr recommendation that I suspected deep down I wouldn’t like (the first being the Criterion Collection DVD of John Ford‘s Young Mr. Lincoln), and which I traded in later on. Kehr is a superb writer, but he’s a bit of an old-school sentimentalist. Never again.

October 7, 2007 5:21 pmby Jeffrey Wells
22 Comments
GOD contenders

The IF THERE WAS A GOD… box has been moved to the middle of the column, so as not to challenge the Oscar Balloon’s bottom-of-the-column position. The “pure” Best Picture contenders are only different from the regular Balloon-ers for the inclusion of Once and Zodiac, which absolutely deserve the toast. Nothing to say (for now) about three I haven’t seen — Charlie Wilson’s War, Sweeney Todd and There Will Be Blood.

The Best Director contenders follow, but the acting nominees aren’t very different at all except for Zodiac‘s Robert Downey, Jr. and Before The Devil Knows You’re Dead‘s Ethan Hawke in the Best Supporting Actor category and Stephanie Daley‘s Amber Tamblyn in a Best Supporting Actress slot. In part because I haven’t really hunkered down with this. Things are especially lean on the Best Supporting Actress front. Ideas?

The GOD box reads as follows…

BEST PICTURE (6): American Gangster (Universal Pictures); Before The Devil Knows You’re Dead (ThinkFilm); No Country for Old Men (Miramax); Once (Fox Searchlight); Things We Lost in the Fire (Dreamamount); Zodiac (Paramount). TAIL-GATING: The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (Warner Bros.); Atonement (Focus Features); The Bourne Ultimatum (Universal); Control (Weinstein Co.); In The Valley of Elah (Warner Independent); Ratatouile (Pixar/Disney). HAVEN’T SEEN ‘EM: Charlie Wilson’s War (Universal); Sweeney Todd (Dreamamount); There Will Be Blood (Paramount Vantage).

BEST DIRECTOR (6): Ridley Scott (American Gangster); Sidney Lumet (Before The Devil Knows You’re Dead); Joel and Ethan Coen (No Country for Old Men); John Carney (Once); David Fincher (Zodiac); Susanne Bier (Things We Lost in the Fire). RUNNERS-UP: Anton Corjbin (Control); Andrew Dominik (The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford); Paul Greengrass (The Bourne Ultimatum); Paul Haggis (In The Valley of Elah); Joe Wright (Atonement). UNSEEN, UNRANKED: Paul Thomas Anderson (There Will Be Blood); Tim Burton (Sweeney Todd); Mike Nichols (Charlie Wilson’s War).

BEST ACTOR (9): Benicio Del Toro (Things We Lost in the Fire); Emile Hirsch (Into the Wild); Phillip Seymour Hoffman (Before The Devil Knows You’re Dead); Tommy Lee Jones (In The Valley of Elah); Sam Riley (Control). RUNNERS-UP: Casey Affleck (The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford); Josh Brolin (No Country for Old Men); Chris Cooper (Breach); James McAvoy (Atonement); Adam Sandler (Reign Over Me); Denzel Washington (American Gangster). UNSEEN, UNRANKED: Daniel Day-Lewis (There Will Be Blood); Tom Hanks (Charlie Wilson’s War);

BEST ACTRESS (8): Halle Berry (Things We Lost in the Fire); Cate Blanchett (I’m Not There); Julie Christie (Away from Her); Marion Cotillard (La Vie En Rose); Keira Knightley (Atonement); Angelina Jolie (A Mighty Heart); Ellen Page (Juno), Amber Tamblyn (Stephanie Daley). UNSEEN, UNRANKED: Amy Adams (Enchanted).

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR (5): Javier Bardem, Tommy Lee Jones (No Country for Old Men); Ethan Hawke (Before The Devil Knows You’re Dead); Paul Dano (There Will Be Blood); Robert Downey, Jr. (Zodiac). RUNNERS-UP: Mark Ruffalo, Anthony Edwards (Zodiac). UNSEEN, UNRANKED: Paul Dano (There Will Be Blood); Phillip Seymour Hoffman (Charlie Wilson’s War); Liev Schreiber (Love in the Time of Cholera).

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS (4): Vanessa Redgrave (Atonement); Marisa Tomei (Before The Devil Knows You’re Dead); Susan Sarandon (In The Valley of Elah); Saoirse Ronan (Atonement).

October 7, 2007 3:23 pmby Jeffrey Wells
52 Comments
Lipizzaners and “Crimson Tide”

“You were right and I was wrong.” Beat, beat…a full five-second pause. “About the horses. The Lipizzaners. They are from Spain, not Portgual.” Spoken by Gene Hackman at the tail end of Crimson Tide, and one of the best closing lines of the last 20 years. (As long as you’ve heard the set-up, that is, which happens about 15 minutes earlier.) Apparent closure to a story of intense conflict by suggesting a capitulation, and then pulling back. With a laugh. Perfect.

October 7, 2007 2:48 pmby Jeffrey Wells

1 Comment
Gilroy on Godfathers

Not a huge surprise, but Sydney Pollack, Steven Soderbergh and Anthony Minghella were three good Godfathers on Michael Clayton, according to director-writer Tony Gilroy. “The advice all the way through the preproduction process is all ambassadorial and diplomatic: ‘Can you call this person for me?’ and ‘Have you ever worked with this costume designer before?’ and ‘I didn’t rehearse the film..is that a good idea?’ It’s all that kind of process stuff. To all of their credit, they gave to me what they would all want [as directors]. They gave me absolute autonomy. They gave me final cut. They protected me. They kept everything bad away from me. They created for me, on a small scale, the situation they all would want to have.”

October 7, 2007 1:51 pmby Jeffrey Wells
61 Comments
Obama trailing in Iowa

I’ve been hanging onto the idea of Barack Obama reviving his candidacy by beating Hillary Clinton in the Iowa caucus. Now comes a Des Moines Register poll showing Clinton at 29%, John Edwards at 23% and Obama at 22%. The Iowa caucus isn’t until mid-January — three and a half months hence — and things could change, of course, but this is awful news.

October 7, 2007 12:14 pmby Jeffrey Wells
19 Comments
“Heartbreak” sinks further

Those Heartbreak Kid numbers have gotten slightly worse. The Farrelly Brothers/Ben Stiller film did about $4,585,000 Friday and was projected yesterday to end up Sunday night with $14,434,000, which was less than the $15 to $16 million that was projected midday Friday and over $5 million less than the $20 million that handicappers were expecting a day or two earlier. This morning’s weekend projection, based on yesterday’s ticket sales, is a limp $13,756,000.

October 7, 2007 9:05 amby Jeffrey Wells

29 Comments
Access to the realm

Jonah Weiner‘s 9.27 Slate piece about what he believes to be unconscious racism on Wes Anderson‘s part (“Unbearable Whiteness”) is interesting reading, but what I liked the most was reading a line from Bottle Rocket — spoken by Luke Wilson‘s Anthony — that I’d forgotten.

“Anthony’s last girlfriend sent him into a psychological tailspin, we learn, when she made a bourgeois proposal,” Weiner explains. “Over at Elizabeth’s beach house,” Anthony says, “she asked me if I’d rather go water-skiing or lay out. And I realized that not only did I not want to answer that question but I never wanted to answer another water-sports question, or see any of these people again for the rest of my life.”

If you come from a well-tended family and you don’t have some kind of thought like this sometime in your teens or your 20s, you have no soul. Of course, sooner or later you grow out of this, and then down the road you start working your tail off — sometimes successfully and sometimes not — so you can make enough money to afford to be with people who ask each other on weekends if they’d like to water-ski or lay out. Not that you want to hang with them, but you want to be able to afford access to their realm.

October 6, 2007 5:20 pmby Jeffrey Wells
67 Comments
Nicole Kidman should pack it in?

This is one of the meanest, most heartless pieces of analytical celebrity journalism I’ve ever read. I’ve never written anything this insensitive or pointless. You don’t pack it in if things aren’t working out. Maybe if you’re struggling or uncertain but not after you’ve already made it. What you do in a jam is redefine, rethink, reinvent. Quitting is completely out of the question. Anyone who suggests this is some kind of fiend.

October 6, 2007 4:45 pmby Jeffrey Wells
5 Comments
Lim on two Joy Divison films

The most important thing in Dennis Lim‘s 10.7 N.Y. Times article about two Joy Division movies that the Weinstein Co. is distributing — Anton Corbijn‘s Control, a feature film, and Grant Gee‘s Joy Division, a documentary — is a line that sums up Corbijn’s film very neatly. It says that Control “largely resists the temptation to assign blame or explanations.”

To me, that’s the all of it. In a very stark and disciplined way, Control is a “this happens, and then this happens” telling of a true-life story that does more than just relate events. Corbijn’s stripped-down, no-dramatic-emphasis approach (along with the film’s exquisite widescreen black-and-white photography) lends a certain bleak distinction, and this is what stays with you days and weeks after.

October 6, 2007 4:25 pmby Jeffrey Wells

3 Comments
Changing, transforming

“Todd Haynes‘s Dylan film isn’t about Dylan. That’s what’s going to be so difficult for people to understand. That’s what’s going to make I’m Not There so trying for the really diehard Dylanists. That’s what might upset the non-Dylanists, who may find it hard to figure out why he bothered to make it at all. And that’s why it took Haynes so long to get it made.

“Haynes was trying to make a Dylan film that is, instead, what Dylan is all about, as he sees it, which is changing, transforming, killing off one Dylan and moving to the next, shedding his artistic skin to stay alive.” — from Robert Sullivan‘s “This Is Not a Bob Dylan Movie,” an eight-page piece (onlline anyway) about I’m Not There in the 10.7.07 issue of Sunday N.Y. Times Magazine.

October 6, 2007 4:03 pmby Jeffrey Wells
9 Comments
Recalling Benicio

There’s a good Chris Jones story about Benicio del Toro in the current Esquire that explains the genesis of a certain white T-shirt that the 40 year-old actor wears in Things We Lost in the Fire — a T-shirt with the words SAME SAME printed on the chest. Not just in a jogging scene (when you can read it plain as day) but in other scenes also — covertly, under shirts, jackets and overcoats, unseen but “there.”

“It became very important to him that Jerry” — Del Toro’s junkie character — “wear the T-shirt in Things We Lost in the Fire,” Jones writes. “It made perfect sense to Del Toro that this would be so.

“‘For me, it just, you know, said something about being levelheaded, not taking those ups and downs,'” Del Toro tells Jones. “‘I thought it said something about, you know, like, how to stay in that middle. Like, too happy would trigger him one way, too sad would trigger him another way, too much money would trigger him one way, not enough money would trigger him another way.’

“Except the film’s director, Susanne Bier, didn’t like the T-shirt,” Jones relates. “She didn’t get it. Maybe it was the language barrier; probably it was that Del Toro is flat-out hard to get. Either way, she resisted, and the Bull dug in his hooves, back and forth like that, until Bier finally relented, and today we see Jerry jogging in this curious T-shirt, spun out of some L.A. kid’s graffiti and a Vancouver souvenir shop.

“But that wasn’t the end of it. Del Toro’s known as Benny the Troublemaker not for nothing. There are other scenes, several of them, in which only he knows he’s wearing the T-shirt, a silent rebellion. He turned it inside out, wore it under blankets and bathrobes, even sneaked it onto a shelf in the background. For him, SAME SAME had become his mission. ‘Because at that point, I am that guy,’ he says. ‘I become the book.'”


Thanks to The Envelope‘s Tom O’Neil for the link to my Things We Lost in the Fire review.

All great actors are at least a little bit eccentric; some a little more so. One reason that Benicio del Toro is such a phenomenal actor is that he’s always considering the eccentric-weirdo whims that flash in his head (call them inspirations, sugges- tions, orders…whatever) and acting accordingly. All hard creative people receive messages from their inner well-of-wisdom all the time. Sometimes the messages are frivolous or unformed, but other times they tell you exactly what to do or say or the move you need to make.

I did some work on a Los Angeles magazine cover story in the summer of ’95 about the “New Noir” movie generation — guys like Bryan Singer, Don Murphy, Roger Avary, Benicio Del Toro and others who’d recently made films that had a film-noirish criminal edge.

Every big name who was featured in the piece met down at Smashbox Studios in Culver City, and the idea (hatched by editor Andy Olstein) was for everyone to hold a snub-nosed .38 or a .45 automatic and aim it at the camera. They were all okay with this except one — Del Toro.

He conveyed his opposition by motioning me over to a corner, or maybe an unoccupied room. (It happened 12 years ago; a couple of details are foggy.) He looked sad, grim. “I don’t want to do this thing with a gun,” he said. He didn’t like weapons, and he hated the cliche of aiming one at the camera. He wasn’t just disagreeing with the concept — the idea of posing with a gat seem to really disturb him deep down.

I could see that the idea was messing with his head, or perhaps with some core belief system…who knew?…so I figured what the hell. One guy not holding a gun wouldn’t be so bad, I reasoned, and it’ll probably add something to the layout. Uniformity is a mark of mediocrity, after all. So I told Del Toro not to sweat it, “this’ll be cool,” and went over to Olstein to break the news.


Gare du Nord

Olstein didn’t want to hear it. Everybody had to point a gun, he said. I should have worked harder to persuade Olstein that arguing with Del Toro was pointless, that it didn’t matter anyway, that it would give a certain distinction for one of the young Hollywood bucks to not hold a gun. But Olstein wouldn’t back off so I pussied out and went back to Del Toro to tell him Olstein was adamant. So was Del Toro. He’d dug in his heels and that was that.

Benicio went before the camera an hour or so later and refused to hold the gun, and Olstein finally caved.

The next time I ran into Del Toro along was at Gare du Nord in Paris on January 1st, 2000. He’d brought in the new millenium with some actress (I forget who) somewhere in the city, and was now waiting for a train to London where he was shooting Guy Ritchie‘s Snatch. We compared notes, talked a bit, shook hands and I walked off to rent a car. Cool coincidence, nothing more.

I’ve run into Benicio a few times since — at press junkets, a few parties, at the Mercer Hotel in Soho last year — but I’ve never quite forgotten that vulnerable but really complex look on his face — pained, worried, intractable — when he said what he said at Smashbox. Serious guy. Meant it. Formidable.

One other thing: Benicio’s junkie character is heavily into Lou Reed in Things We Lost in the Fire, and Reed’s “Sweet Jane” is heard twice in the film — early on and over the closing credits.

October 6, 2007 2:02 pmby Jeffrey Wells
22 Comments
“Crossing Over” in ’07?

There’s some doubt in the air about whether the Weinstein Co. is going to give Wayne Kramer‘s Crossing Over, a Traffic-like drama about the immigration situation between Mexico and the U.S., a modest platform-type release in December. One of the reasons for uncertainty is that the Weinstein Co. recently mailed a list of ’07 films to Academy members, and Crossing Over wasn’t on it.

Kramer (The Cooler, Running Scared) directed and wrote with Harrison Ford, Cliff Curtis, Ashley Judd, Sean Penn, Ray Liotta, Alicia Braga, Alice Eve and Jim Sturgess topping the cast. My personal suspicion is that the Weinsteiners will mainly be pushing The Great Debaters (a Denzel Washington-inspires-the- students drama, based on a true story) along with I’m Not There and Control, but a person on the Crossing Over team believes nonetheless that some kind of limited opening will happen before 12.31.07.

“There’s a very strong possibility that we’ll platform in December (probably mid to late) and go wider in January,” he says. “A Crossing Over trailer should be coming out in the next couple of weeks, and Harvey [Weinstein] seems very supportive of the film. Anything can change, as it often does in this business, but the goal is to release in 2007, specifically because the immigration issue is white hot right now and the film is set in 2007 (in the week that the immigration bill failed in Congress).

“And Harrison Ford, by the way, gives one of the best performances of his career in our film. For all his fans who were disappointed that he didn’t participate in Traffic or Syriana, this one is for them. Also, Summer Bishil from Nothing is Private is a revelation, and look for good performances from Alice Eve and Jim Sturgess. And from Sean Penn, of course, who is incapable of delivering a false moment.”

October 6, 2007 12:22 pmby Jeffrey Wells

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