Month: December 2007

Jeff Sneider, the AICN/Variety guy, took a group of friends to see Control at “the decrepit” Regency Fairfax on Beverly Blvd. last Sunday night, and was treated to a projection nightmare of classic proportions. Here’s his story:

“We get through the commercials and trailers but then I don’t see The Weinstein Company logo (newly changed to TWC at Monday night’s Great Debaters screening) or the funky Northsee logo. The movie starts snd the credits roll, and it’s suddenly apparent that the black-and-white Control has been upgraded to color and that Paul Schrader is the new director. In short, the projectionist had begun to show The Walker.
“So I ran out, convinced it was my mistake for walking into the wrong theater and desperate not to miss the opening minutes of Control. I check the other two theaters at that venue and by the time I storm back up the ramp to yell at management, the entire theater full of angry Joy Division fans in the original theatre had filed out. Management comes out to apologize. It’s not the end of the world, they say, but then they can’t just put the movie back on immediately.
“So we have to sit through another 20 minutes of commercials and trailers including that dreadful ad for the National Guard featuring a 3 Doors Down song that’s so bad, the only thing I can do to keep my ears from bleeding is to keep reminding myself that soon enough, we’ll be listening to Bowie, the Sex Pistols and Joy Division for two hours.
“So we sit through the same trailers more or less (is TWC really banking on their acquisition of Under the Same Moon?) before the film starts. All my friends are miserable at this point. We get out of the 9:40 pm screening around 12:15 am. And here’s the kicker. All four of them (all white, aged 22-25, in the industry and of the high thread-count variety) hated the movie. They thought Sam Riley gave a very good performance in a terrible, drab, and worst of all, boring film. I was in absolute disbelief and I’m still shocked that they failed to see the inherit brilliance of Anton Corbjin‘s directorial debut.
“What can I say? There’s no accounting for taste.”
Wells to Sneider: Start shopping around for a more evolved class of friends. You say these guys are high thread-counters (i.e., a euphemism that alludes to refined taste) and in the industry, but they’ve obviously got a ways to go in their ability to recognize high-end filmmaking so…I don’t know, something doesn’t calculate. Control is one of the year’s absolute finest — there’s no debating that whatsoever unless you’re Robert Koehler. You certainly can’t say it sucks outright — that’s out. It sounds harsh to put it this way, but they’re probably just not perceptive enough.
You can still call these guys and meet up for drinks now and then, but the writing on the wall is saying that you need to think about hooking up with a better class of social allies who might wonder in their heart of hearts if you’re hip enough for them to hang out with. Always “relationship” in an upward or lateral direction — never downward.

Just to be clear: while the Writers Guild of America West announced Monday it has blocked the Hollywood Foreign Press Association from using guild writers on its Golden Globes award show next month, and said “no” to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences about using current and historical film clips on its Academy Awards broadcast, the Academy has for whatever reason not requested a waiver for using guild writers on the 2.24.08 Oscar show.
They should spare themselves the effort. In a 12.19 N.Y. Times story on the matter by David Carr and Michael Ceiply, it is reported that WGA chiefs directors have “already decided they [will] not grant a waiver for writers, including the prospective host Jon Stewart, to work on the show.
A guild spokesman told the Times on Tuesday that “the union planned to have picket lines around the Globes ceremony in Beverly Hills, Calif., set for broadcast on 1.13.08 on NBC, potentially leading to empty seats where there should be Hollywood royalty. He said the union had not yet decided whether to picket the Oscars.
“With those moves, Hollywood√ɬ¢√¢‚Äö¬¨√¢‚Äû¬¢s most cherished movie awards shows could lose much of their star power, viewers, advertising revenue and cachet,” the Times story explains. “Suddenly, the film industry is looking at its first real damage from a six-week-old writers√ɬ¢√¢‚Äö¬¨√¢‚Äû¬¢ strike that has mostly been chewing up the television schedule.
√ɬ¢√¢‚Äö¬¨√Ö‚ÄúWe were surprised to meet opposition at this early stage,√ɬ¢√¢‚Äö¬¨√Ǭù said AMPAS executive director Bruce Davis. “We thought we√ɬ¢√¢‚Äö¬¨√¢‚Äû¬¢d be Switzerland.√ɬ¢√¢‚Äö¬¨√Ǭù

Denzel Washington dropped by the Harvard University campus this evening following a screening of The Great Debaters. He did so at the invitation of Dr. S. Allen Counter, a Harvard neuroscience professor who enjoys considerable respect in both Cambridge and Stockholm circles. The event happened at the Carpenter Film Center, smack in the middle of the Harvard campus. Everyone was dressed in tuxedos and gowns except for Jett and myself. Here’s a portion of what Denzel said during the q & a, which lasted about 35 or 40 minutes.

Tuesday, 12.18, 9:35 pm

Another poll confirming very high negatives for Hillary Clinton with 42 % of third-party or independent voters and 17 % of Democrats saying they’ll vote against her no matter what. Younger male voters are “particularly cold,” the story says. “More than half of the adult men younger than 40 said they would use their vote to keep Mrs. Clinton from returning to the White House.” The candidate with the second-highest negatives is Rudy Giuliani.

“Very much in line with recognizable Oprah Winfrey mandates, The Great Debaters promotes literacy and articulateness, highlights the significant oral tradition in black storytelling, crams in as many factual details and statistics as time will allow, and depicts a society that, however impoverished and oppressed, valued knowledge and education,” writes Variety‘s Todd McCarthy in his 12.18 review.

“Above all, pic illustrates that the civil rights movement didn’t just spring out of nowhere in the 1960s, but was preceded by nearly a century’s worth of innumerable small, brave, mostly unknown steps.
“As agenda-driven and well-scrubbed as the film may be, that’s already a lot to pack into a straightforward narrative and doesn’t even include the story’s most unexpected sidelight — the implication that the revered English teacher and intellectually incisive debate coach, the real-life Melvin B. Tolson (played by director Denzel Washington), was a radical labor organizer and possible communist.
“The first notable element for contempo audiences is how well-dressed, polite and well-spoken everyone onscreen is; the era’s profound deprivations notwithstanding, the constant supply of freshly cleaned clothes is impressive. Even more striking is how the rural students — who, when they debate, wear tuxedos — toss off Latin phrases and quotations from James Joyce and D.H. Lawrence with the casual insouciance of Oxford lads. Who knew?”

The trailer for Fool’s Gold (Warner Bros., 2.8.08), which showed before last night’s Juno screening at the Leows/AMC plex near Harvard Square, promises a coarse, idiot-level romcom in the vein of Jewel of the Nile and Romancing the Stone.

You can tell right away from Hudson’s food-throwing-on-the-yacht bit that director Andy Tennant hasn’t lost his knack for over-emphasis. I can only presume that people like myself are going to hate most if not all of this. That seems to be the general idea, at least. Matthew McConaughey, the reigning king of the empties, costars with Kate Hudson, who has made nothing of any consequence since Almost Famous.

The Alliance of Women Journalists has come up with three lists and several awards covering the ’07 moviegoing year. Among their EDA (Excellent Dynamic Activism) Special Mention Award winners: Norbit (Hall of Shame award), Hilary Swank (Actress Most In Need Of A New Agent), Margot at the Wedding (Movie You Wanted To Love But Just Couldn’t), Viggo Mortensen‘s full frontal in Eastern Promises (Unforgettable Moment Award plus Best Depiction Of Nudity or Sexuality)…whatever.

The trailer for Drillbit Taylor (Paramount, 3.21), the Owen Wilson-playing-bodyguard-for-schoolkids comedy directed by Steven Brill, written by Kristofor Brown and Seth Rogen and produced by Judd Apatow.

This is one of those six-degrees-of-separation deals based upon on a complete aural misunderstanding, but I feel it needs to be discussed and cleared up in this heated political season. I first saw Warren Beatty, Robert Towne and Hal Ashby‘s Shampoo in ’74, before I was a journalist and had access to press kits and way, way before the arrival of the IMDB. So for many years I was under the impression that Beatty’s hairdresser character, whose name was actually George Roundy (a mixture of “randy” and “roundelay“), was called George Romney.

George Romney and 10 year-old son Mitt in 1957; Warren Beatty in Shampoo

I’ve seen the film six or seven times since, and although I’ve had some slight hearing problems lately his last name has always sounded an awful lot like “Romney” to me. Naturally, I always thought it was curious that Towne and Beatty would choose this name given the existence of the real-life George Romney, the Republican governor Michigan (from ’63 to ’69) who run for president in ’68, and whose son MItt Romney is currently running for the ’08 Republican presidential nomination. But I also thought it might be some kind of intended anti-Republican jab, given Shampoo‘s political tone.
Anyway, the Romney thing was pure disorientation on my end and utterly meaningless. But then I figured, wait…I’ll bet others have had this idea that Beatty’s Shampoo guy is called George Romney. Then I realized that mishearing it wasn’t my fault at all. It was the sound systems they had in theatres in the mid ’70s, which were terrible.

Please forgive me for not posting anything over the last hour. I ran down to Joe’s American Bar (Dartmouth and Newbury) to hoist a glass over the news that Peter Jackson and New Line have buried the hatchet and announced that J.R.R. Tolkien‘s The Hobbit is going to be made into two films. This will give me posting material for the next two or three years. I would have even more to work with (i.e., bounce off) if Steven Spielberg were involved as an exec producer. The only bummer, according to Variety‘s Michael Fleming, is that Sam Raimi may direct instead of Jackson.

Yesterday the WGA denied waivers that would allow the Golden Globes and Oscar awards show to use writers for jokes and patter. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences was also told “no” on the use of clips from motion pictures and past Oscar shows — i.e., no clips of the performances and films being nominated. The mood of the producers, who had been in denial for weeks about this possibility, is starting to side-step into freak-out mode. But if they get creative the shows could actually be more fun.

Film Experience author Nathaniel R. has come up with five suggestions for award-show diversions that won’t require writing. My two favorites are (a) all Best Actor candidates thrown naked into a Russian bathhouse set to fend off real life assassins with their bare hands, and (2) Sweeney Todd star Johnny Depp shaves the heavily-bearded Phillip Seymour Hoffman…live!

I saw Juno for the second time last night at a Leows/AMC plex near Harvard Square. It played a tiny bit better than it did at the Toronto Film Festival, which was mostly thumbs-up to begin with. It’s a smart, ascerbic and kind-hearted film about…a bunch of things. Growing up, good parenting, working through stuff, finding true love? It grooves, it meanders, it has a heart…and I could tell that the people sitting near me in the small theatre were falling for it.

Ellen Page is still enjoyably spunky and feisty in the lead role but (here goes again) she still seems like too much of a scrawny elf to play a woman with child — it’s a little like watching Rick Moranis portray Primo Carnera. And that guitar duet Page performs at the end with Michael Cera is just…fine. Which is another word for nice. Which isn’t enough of a finale for a film that would be a Best Picture nominee.
But Jennifer Garner‘s performance as a clenched, hard-wired career woman who’s looking to adopt Juno’s baby went up a notch or two. I don’t know why exactly. She’s doesn’t have a big money scene or anything. She just inhabits very fully and believably — her character feels lived-in. Ands that final baby-holding moment works pretty well. All I know is that I sat up and took notice and went “hmmm.”
So I’m thinking of putting Garner third in my list of Best Supporting Actress nominees, right behind Cate Blanchett and AmyRyanAmyRyanAnyRyan.