Day: November 2, 2007

The idea in persuading Into The Wild song composer Eddie Vedder to perform a short acoustic set at the Paramount theatre last night was to promote Vedder’s soundtrack album (featuring nine originals, two covers). It was also, naturally, about refreshing everyone’s thinking about Sean Penn‘s film being a serious Best Picture contender. Which it seems to be. Penn’s best-directed, much-admired film has caught a kind of current; ditto Emile Hirsch‘s Oscar-calibre lead performance and Hal Holbrook‘s supporting turn.

Into The Wild star Emile Hirsch, director-screenwriter Sean Penn at tonight’s Eddie Vedder performance (i.e., songs he composed for the film plus two or three others) at Paramount Studios — Friday, 11.2.07, 10:10 pm.

Penn and Hirsch introduced Vedder around 10:10 pm following a screening of the film. (I was off seeing the 3-D Beowulf at Universal Citywalk until 9:30 pm.) Vedder sang six or seven tunes, the stand-outs being “Rise Up,” “No Ceiling,” “Drifting” and “You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away.” We all love that rough gravelly voice, don’t we? I was standing ten or so feet away as he performed, and admiring his fret work as he went through the chords of the John Lennon song.

(l. to r.) Penn, Hirsch, Eddie Vedder following performance — applause, cheers, whoo-whoos.

Long-haired and bearded, dressed in denim and work boots, Vedder seemed healthy, alert and in good spirits. I noticed and for some reason considered the fact that Vedder has relatively small feet.

I saw Mark Ruffalo milling around, didn’t say hi. Kris Tapley reported last night that former HE hombre Cameron Crowe (hasn’t responded to e-mails in ages, probably hates me for bringing up the post-Elizabethtown fetal-tuck position syndrome), Ringo Starr and Wynona Rider were there also.

Cinematical’s James Rocchi interviewed me three or four days ago about various Oscar-race issues (“Does Into the Wild play better for Baby Boomers than younger audiences? Can Once get a second chance? And do movie journalists have a responsibility to reflect the Oscar race, or to try and influence it?”).

The answer to the third question is that (a) it’s derelict for Oscar prognosticators to not try and influence the Oscar race so that better films are considered and rewarded, and (b) it’s absolutely rancid for movie journos to just sit back and merely “reflect” it — i.e., report on the race and trying to predict Academy favorites. There’s an uploadable podcast version attached to the piece.

An ecstatic but completely unreliable fanboy review of Robert Zemeckis‘ Beowulf has appeared on Aint It Cool. The guy is calling the 3-D Paramount release “a fucking masterpiece…really epic… superb [with] Oscar-calibre performances …one of the best animated films ever made…heart-pounding action sequences and a good dose of edge-of- your-seat scares (especially in the first hour).” Except he says if Beowulf had been a live-action film it “would have been nominated for Best Picture.” Take high-school English much? His entire review is suspect because of this one grammatical wrongo.

Anyone who goes the distance in the New York City Marathon has my respect and then some. But having done some running in my time, I’m wondering if Katie Holmes, who is after all surrounded by minders, “yes” people and Scientologists 24-7, will be able to run the entire distance this Sunday.

Like everyone else, Holmes will have to hump all the way from the foot of the Verrazano Narrows Bridge in Staten Island and up through Brooklyn, Queens, Manhattan, the Bronx and finish somewhere in southern Central Park. Life doesn’t get much lonelier or more grueling than when you’re running a marathon, and for the first time since she hooked up with Tom Cruise, Holmes will be entirely alone. No goons, no Xenu, no obsessive assistants…it’ll be entirely between herself, her leg muscles and her spirit.

“The WGAW Board and WGAE Council have unanimously approved a strike, based upon the unanimous recommendation of the WGA Negotiating Committee. The strike will begin on Monday, November 5, 2007, at 12:01 a.m. Note: Picketing and other strike support assignments will be finalized and communicated over the weekend. All WGAW members should monitor the www.wga.org website for more information.” — message received by WGA member at 1:52 pm, sent by wgawest@wga.org.

Red Carpet District‘s Kris Tapley has thanked Cigarettes & Red Vines for pointing out an array of Out Now photos from There Will Be Blood, and here I am joining the daisy chain.

Daniel Day Lewis, Paul Thomas Anderson

I’m not doubting that The Envelope has undergone some kind of redesign, but I’m not seeing what it is that’s different. It would help if someone would send me a couple of “before” and “after” screen-grab shots.

“If you only see one movie at AFI Fest, see the one with Devin Faraci in it!” — written by a fan of Michael Addis and Jamie Kennedy‘s Heckler.

“Bee Movie isn’t a B movie, it’s a Z movie, as in dizmal” — without question the funniest and most penetrating of all the Bee-stingers I’ve read today.

The author is Wall Street Journal critic Joe Morgenstern, who also observes that star-producer-cowriter Jerry Seinfeld “delivers every line — every stupid bee joke that he and his cronies could cook up — with a pounding, punishing triumphalism that recalls not the Seinfeld of Seinfeld but Milton Berle on a really bad night.

“At one point in Barry’s honey trial, an exasperated defense lawyer asks, ‘How do we know this talking bee isn’t some kind of Hollywood wizardry?’ Would that wizards had left their mark. This is Hollywood hackery.”

There is nothing on the face of this earth as 100% unreliable as a Harry Knowles effusion about a movie he’s been privately shown by some chummy, back-rubbing distributor. His early-bird Sweeney Todd review is therefore totally theoretically dismissable because everyone knows it might well be another Armageddon ejaculation. I love Harry personally, but he’s shown time and again that he’s too emotional and too susceptible to be trusted out of the gate.

Johnny Depp, James Cagney, Rex Harrison — the three most famous sing-talkers in Hollywood history

That said, he’s calling Sweeney Todd “Tim Burton‘s best film since Ed Wood — which I consider to be his very best film to date. That said, upon multiple viewings it is possible this film will become my favorite Burton film.

He’s also calling it “a hybrid of Disney and Bava and Corman.” Mario Bava? Jesus H. Christ…that’s it as far as the Academy is concerned. Bava is an acquired taste (ivory-tower elitists like Dave Kehr are among the celebrators) but Academy squares aren’t sophisticated enough — the Bava thing goes right over their heads, or under them.

“In structure [Todd] is a sweeping love story between a young innocent man and a caged would-be Repunzel…but then there’s that rare character that you never see in a Disney fantasy musical. A bitter psychopathic father figure that is out to revenge the horror of his own life.” [Note: it’s actually spelled Rapunzel — Knowles should have spell-checked.]

“I would call this Tim Burton’s Grimmest Fairy Tale….a delicious Grand Guignol tale that is, simply irresistible. And as a work of film, set to Sondheim’s songs it is very much the great dark musical-fantasy horror work.”

The most interesting part of the essay is Knowles warning readers that Todd is “almost entirely a singing film” but not really. To hear it from Knowles, Johny Depp (who plays Sweeney) doesn’t really sing as much as channel Rex Harrison in My Fair Lady and James Cagney in Yankee Doodle Dandy by half-grooving and half-posturing with “that form of dialogue known as sing-talking.”

MCN’s David Poland praises the first act of There Will Be Blood, but says it goes off the tracks at a certain point in Act Two and simultaneously blows itself up and wildly urinates all over itself in what Poland calls “the absolutely disastrous last major scene in the film.” Reporting this failure is difficult for Poland as “there is spectacular work here. There is something brutal from my side of the screen when there is this much to respect and even love in a film, and [then] to see it fail in the end absolutely.”