Month: December 2007

Ellen Page‘s Juno performance is highly likable and sympathetic. You’re with her from the get-go because of her indefatigable spunk and pizazz. But the first time I saw Juno (at the Toronto Film Festival), I had a thought that wouldn’t leave me alone. It’s going to sound a little oddball but here it is. My first thought was “how and why did Page’s character get pregnant?”

More to the point, why did director Jason Reitman cast an actress based on her sass and spirit, but with no regard for the fact that in the real world a young woman who looks like Page — midget-sized, scrawny, looking like a feisty 11 year-old with absolutely nothing about her that says “alluring breeding-age female” — most likely wouldn’t exactly be fighting off the attentions of hormonally-crazed teenage boys, including nice-guy dweebs like Michael Cera‘s character?

Unfortunate pregnancies happen to young girls of all shapes and sizes — obviously, sadly — but I kept saying to myself (and I’m writing this having once been 16 and 17 years old) that Page is the super-bright girl you want for a good friend — someone you can talk to at 12:30 ayem on a school night when you’re depressed or in trouble or enthusing over a band you just heard. But she’s not what any teenaged boy would call a hot package. She’s got the soul and the wit and the attitude of a Dorothy Parker (and the value that comes with such a person is priceless), but Juno is about an accidental breeder, and certain qualities need to be evident for this to happen in most circumstances.

Every time I’ve seen a too-young pregnant girl in real life I’ve quietly remarked to myself for this or that reason, “Too bad, but I can sorta see how that happened.” I’m just saying it didn’t quite calculate when I first laid eyes on Page. I’ve been sitting on this impression for three months now, and didn’t express it because I knew people would call me a dog. But it’s a fair thing to say, I think. Page is great on her own, but she doesn’t seem right for the role. Or rather, she’s right in every way except physically.

I need to remember to say “woot!” the next time I want to say “yaay!”

This bad-angle camcorder video, taken before an IMAX showing of I Am Legend and posted last night, shows most of the bank-job sequence that begins Chris Nolan‘s The Dark Knight. It was clearly shot with impressions of the legendary bank-heist sequence from Michael Mann‘s Heat in mind.

I love the silhouette of the moving head of the guy in front of the camera operator in the very beginning, and the laughter than follows the “bus driver?…what bus driver?” ine. And I love how Willliam Fichtner‘s reading of the line “do you have any idea who you’re stealing from?” (which refers to the fact that the bank has lots of mafia money in its vaults) is very similar to Warren Beatty‘s yelling during the “bark like a dog” sequence in Bugsy.

All local TV newscasters are Stepford robots, but the Boston newscasters are extra-offensive, I feel, in the way they reinforce feelings of fear and trepidation when heavy snow comes along. Every line of copy they read says “uh-oh, be careful, this is a concern,” etc. It’s challenging and inconvenient — okay, unpleasant — when you venture outdoors, yes, but to this Los Angeleno’s eyes snowstorms are beautiful, and not just visually.

Same old corner of Beacon and Clarendon — Sunday, 12.16.07, 8:15 am.

Like any mass imposition of adversity, snowstorms are summoners of the spirit. They bring out the best in people. Boston has been besieged by kindliness over the last few days — people holding the arms of total strangers in danger of falling, pushing strangers’ cars that are stuck in ice and slush, constantly shovelling steps and walkways, being extra-friendly, etc. It’s a very good place to be, vibe-wise.

“Money makes your life easier. If you’re lucky [enough] to have it, you’re lucky.” — Robert De Niro, quoted in the “What I’ve Learned” section on page 96 of the current Esquire (January 2008, Johnny Depp on the cover).

“People who tend to go after money as a solution for whatever they feel they lack had better be careful what they pray for, because they just may get it.” — Eric Clapton, quoted on page 95 in the same issue.

“In both novel and film form, The Kite Runner recounts a simple yet shrewd story about that favorite American pastime: self-improvement. [The lead character] Amir’s childhood mistake isn’t a careless juvenile offense; it’s a human stain that must be scrubbed out through self-abnegation, confession and personal transformation.

“Yet, watching this film, you are left to wonder whom precisely is all this suffering for — is it for Amir? Hassan? Afghanistan? Or do Hassan and the story’s other sad children — especially those hollow-eyed boys and girls glimpsed during the preposterous climax in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan — suffer because it’s possible to package other people’s pain and turn it into a commercial diversion?

“It’s no surprise that for all its foreign trappings, The Kite Runner tells the same old comforting story. We wouldn’t have it any other way.” — from Manohla Dargis‘s 12.14 N.Y. Times review — a stake in the heart of one of the better-liked “heart” movies of the awards season.

Belated congrats to Paramount Vantage chief John Lesher, one of the most Clark Kent-ish, most perceptive and least pretentious studio chiefs I’ve ever run into, for being appointed to the post of overall Paramount Motion Picture Group top dog & grand poobah. Nikki Finke‘s posting last Thursday says Lesher will be calling the creative and business-affairs shots for the general Paramount operation, including the film divisions of Paramount Vantage, MTV, Nickelodeon, Comedy Central and BET. Lesher will report directly to Paramount chairman Brad Grey.

You can be smug and use terms like “stunning” or “sobering” to describe Daniel Day Lewis‘s fashion sense. What it’s about, really, is a kind of rural Irish attitude. I’ve been to social occasions in southwestern Ireland (in a town called Knocklong) and I have a recollection of what goes there. Plaid suits aren’t normal — they’re eccentric — but at the same time they don’t weird people out. I would personally lose it if I was at a party in which, say, 50 guys were dressed like this, but just one is fine.

“I find it distressing that we now live in a film-culture climate where a number of very talented film critics find their column inches reduced or themseves out of work at publications that think nothing of devoting reams of print and/or online space to awards-season speculating — most of which, as I further point out, isn’t so much concerned with the quality of the awards-season films as whether or not they’ll be to the Academy’s liking.” — L.A. Weekly critic Scott Foundas in a 12.11 posting.

As I’ve said numerous times, trying to make shrewd calls about likely Oscar contenders while knowing in my film-worshipping heart of hearts that many of the year’s real champs in terms of quality are being completely ignored by the Academy prognostication crew is…agonizing. Agonizing to watch this process in slow motion, I mean. A voice from deep in my chest says to me over and over, “You have to do this differently somehow because the usual-usual is wrong…the Academy decisions about some matters (like foreign-film qualification) are sometimes woefully ignorant and small-minded…you need to do what you can to try and lessen the noise and cut through the crap.”

But I’m trying to speak up for the right movies, at least. At least I’m not writing how wonderful and heaven-sent Amy Adams is in Enchanted — she’s very fetching and spirited but c’mon, calm down. Or how sublime George Clooney is in Michael Clayton. He gives a very noble and well-cut performance in a very well-crafted and 90% satisfying film, but is it right and proportionate to call it the stuff of legend?

This is a gig, a passion, a racket, a calling…and the advertising money that stems from the mythology of Oscar prognostication is very nice. Essential, I mean to say. I don’t know what else to say. It’ll be great, at least, to see at least some recognition for the right people and the right movies next February.”

Two days ago I was told that I Am Legend would make $44 or $45 million for the weekend. The 12.14 release date, I was told, would be a bit of an issue. If it wasn’t opening in the Thanksgiving-to-Xmas dead zone (i.e., a period when people pass up films in order to save money for Xmas gifts and preparing feasts for the in-laws), it would make a lot more. Plus the northeastern snowfalls would slow it down a tad. All hooey, it turned out. The big-canvas Will Smith sci-fi drama earned $28 million yesterday and is looking to nudge $70 million by Sunday night.

The weekend’s #2 film is Alvin & the Chipmunks (20th Century Fox) did close to $13 million yesterday. The Saturday box-office surge that family-audience movies always benefit from should kick in, and it should end up with at least $35 million by tomorrow night. I saw the trailer a while ago and was flat-out horrified. I won’t see this film under any circumstances, ever. I wouldn’t watch it with a loaded gun pointed at my head. “Go ahead…shoot!” I would calmly reply. “I regret that I have only one life to give in the cause of renouncing insipid family movies.”

The Golden Compass made roughly $3 million yesterday and is looking at $10 million for the weekend. The projected haul will mean a 60% drop from last weekend, give or take. The Golden Lion of the Rings & the Wardrobe & the Order of the Magical Polar Bear is dead, dead…deader than dead. If this were Japan, certain New Line executives would be getting out their samurai swords in preparation for ritual seppuku.

A new HD trailer for George Clooney‘s Leatherheads (4.4.08) — clearly a jaunty, light-hearted thing, directed by and starring Clooney. I was going to say “comedy” but a voice tells me that’s not quite the term. Renee Zellweger, John Krasinski, Tommy Hinckley and Wayne Duvall costar.

Now playing on myspacetv.com, the worst bootleg cell-phone video of a movie trailer ever captured. If there’s a God, the person who took this will never be a cinematographer. The image is lopsided, it wobbles from time to time, somebody’s head is in the way. Oh, yeah…the trailer is about Chris Nolan‘s The Dark Knight.