Month: March 2008

I meant to get into Jack Lechner‘s piece about bad movie titles yesterday (posted by Variety‘s Anne Thompson). It was apparently inspired by Quantum of Solace, the admittedly terrible title of the next James Bond film, but I can riff about movie titles for hours.

You know a movie title is bad, says Lechner, when (1) it’s incomprehensible until you see the movie, but not intriguing enough to make you want to see it; (2) it sends a misleading signal about tone or content (example: Cinderella Man); (3) it’s boring or (4) it’s Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever. But the reason some are bad (or at seem bad to some of us) is that they all have to be short and punchy. Which I tend to agree with, for the most part — vague blah-blah titles turn me off as much as the next guy. I just don’t see why it has to sort and punchy all the time.
I would also blame a general refusal among general audience to respond to titles with poetic elements — metaphor, alliteration, allusion. Every movie title has to have a meat-and-potatoes quality, or no sale. Which means, generally speaking, that it also can’t be too long.
Can anyone imagine a new movie being called This Sporting Life? (Not specific enough, what kind of sport?, too thoughtful) or If…? (way too vague and imprecise.) Or The Loneliness fo the Long-Distance Runner? Or The Dark at the Top fo the Stairs? or How Green Was My Valley?
I’ve never gotten over the decision to remake Jacques Tourneur‘s Out of the Past — a title with a vaguely eerie, haunting quality — and call it Against All Odds, which seethes with machismo and feels like a sports allusion of some kind. That, to me, was the ultimate example of a movie title dumb-down.
Mark Caro‘s Pop Machine’s ran a Worst Movie TItle Ever poll a few months ago — here. And here‘s the sum-up of the many nominees.

It is hurtful and degrading, I feel, to evaluate the sexual attraction levels of humans like a trade critic might evaluate the features of a new car or cell phone, but since Ashley Alexandra Dupre (a.k.a. Ashley Youmans), otherwise known as the prostitute who spent some private time with former New York governor Eliot Spitzer, being in the business of offering her sexual wares for big money, I want to clarify a point I made yesterday, which is that her nose is too big.

She has a kind of Beagle Boys nose, which is to say a nose that looks a tiny bit canine. If a professional cartoonist was to draw a charicature of Dupre, he/she would almost certainly give her the same kind of black-tipped dog nose that Disney’s Goofy character had. Many cartoonists, in fact, have used dog noses.
I have one other comment. If I were a john about to pay $4500 for her services, which, in my mind, should result in the company of a woman with the most exquisite and delicate Michelangelo features imaginable (i.e., Kate Moss-level), I would also have concerns about her fingers, which are too thick. I’m not the first person to use the term “thick-fingered vulgarian,” but it’s a physical distinction everyone is familiar with. Refined, upscale, top-of-the-line women don’t have thick or semi-thick digits, which come from being big-boned in general.
I wouldn’t say this unless we were talking about a woman in the trade. AAD is currently famous in part because of how she looks and, of course, her willingness to offer intimacies for money, so I think it’s fair, this one time, to offer views on this topic. Full disclosure: I’ve never paid for the company of a pro in my life, although it’s hard to argue too strenuously with that famous Robert Towne line in The Last Detail, spoken by Otis Young: “Any [female intimacy moment] you get in this world you’re gonna have to pay for, one way or the other.”

I asked the independent producer quoted below to elaborate on the eternal trusim that anyone who smacks of any kind of competitiveness or type-A ambition is always threatening to the person above them. She passed along an allegedly true story about a senior production vp who’d just taken over the job of studio president, having arranged to get his previous boss fired. Obviously not wanting the same thing to happen to himself, he had to decide which of the studio’s production vps he could trust and which he couldn’t. Who stays and who goes?
The studio chief decided on a brilliant deciding strategy. As an ostensible gesture of support, he offered all of the studio production vps a new car on the studio’s dime, telling them to choose whatever they’d like. Almost all of them asked for a super-expensive prestige car — BMWs, Mercedes-Benz, etc. But one studio vice-president asked for a VW Cabriolet. The studio chief decided to keep that guy and fire everyone else. He knew that anyone who would choose a Cabriolet is not that ambitious and probably a guy who deep-down sees himself as some kind of second-rater, and would therefore not scheme to get the studio chief fired down the road. He was probably right.

Variety‘s Michael Fleming has written that “insiders have been surprised to find WB brass aggressively courting New Line production prexy Toby Emmerich to run a scaled-down version of New Line” on the Warner Bros. lot. Except Fleming doesn’t explain why the surprise. Is it because running a vastly scaled-down operation is being seen by industry players as a comedown for Emmerich?
No, says an insider I spoke to this morning. “Why would [WB production chief Jeff] Robinov want a New Line player in there?,” he asks. “His way of doing things is to put his own people into posts, like putting Polly Cohen into the top Warner Independent job. It’s all about control for him. He’s about protecting his own turf. Mark Gill would be the first one to tell you that.”
An independent producer has another view. “Tobey was never been popular in the town, not at first anyway, in part because Mike DeLuca [the previous New Line production president] was so popular,” she says. “He doesn’t return a lot of phone calls, or didn’t. He became imperial overnight and people were saying ‘who the hell’s this guy’? Now, things evened out over time but he didn’t start out well.
“Since then Tobey has gotten very good politically at being one of the guys, and that’s what works in this town. Clearing out out the house is quid pro quo when a company is revamped or taken over, but the new chiefs usually hold on to at least one person who knows the history of the projects and knows the talent, and that person tends to be the weakest and most non-threatening of all.”

In a 3.13 N.Y. Times article by Bill Carter, Saturday Night Live producer Lorne Michaels and writer Jim Downey have tried to quash talk about the show’s satirical sketches having favored Hillary Clinton over Barack Obama. Which — hello? — has obviously been the case. Michaels tells Carter that he’s “sensitive to the suggestion that we’re in the service of Hillary Clinton this year….that obviously is not the case…we don’t lay down for anybody.”

Fred Armisen and Amy Poehler in a recent SNL sketch.

I don’t believe that at all. I think Michaels and Downey laid their cards and feelings on the table with those sketches, and columnists and others reacted as they did, and now they’re blowing smoke up everyone’s ass by trying to sell the idea that everyone misunderstood.
Except I’ve understood all along that Michaels is a Hillary supporter. (Am I wrong?) Downey has told Carter “he would definitely vote for [Obama] if he were nominated,” which means, most likely, that he’s not supporting him now.
Michaels and Downey are just a couple of bullshit artists doing a little deck-reshuffling and back-pedaling. They got their licks in and found contentment, but now they’re trying to protect the brand and shore things up. They make me sick.

Obviously not the same issue as the one that led to Edward R. Murrrow‘s historic broadcast against Senator Joseph L. McCarthy, and yet reminiscent of this. To paraphrase Paddy Chayefsky, MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann was “positively clanking with moral fervor” here, and rightly so. His closing words: “Good night, and good luck.”

Werner Herzog‘s Encounters at the End of the World, a doc “about the daily lives of Antarcticans,” will be jointly distributed by ThinkFilm and Image Entertainment in partnership with Discovery Films. I’m so on top of things (i.e., frazzled, distracted) that I missed the first screenings at last September’s Toronto Film Festival.
The subjects are the Antarctic community of “McMurdo Station, on Ross Island, the headquarters for the National Science Foundation and home to 1100 people during the austral summer (October to February.) Beyond the settlement, he ventures through a science-fiction landscape, from the under-ice depths of the Ross Sea, to the brink of the Mount Erebus volcano,” according to Herzog’s website.
Encounters will open on June 11th.

Geraldine Ferraro played the race card, got slammed for it, denied she had done so, and now has resigned at the request of the Clinton campaign. Tarnished her rep, good riddance to bad rubbish, close the door on your way out.

If you were Ashley Alexandra Dupre, the 22 year-old whose hotel-room sessions with New York governor Eliot Spitzer led to his resignation earlier today, wouldn’t you want to get out of the prostitution racket by trading up on the publicity? It would be sad and sordid and icky, but don’t we all need to strike the iron when it’s hot?

If I was a talent manager and she came to me looking for help, I would pitch a reality show in which Ashley tries to change her life by submitting to an Eliza Doolittle-like makeover — a “pimp my ride” show for humans instead of cars. She’d attend cultivation classes, college philosophy courses, art classes, diction lessons, piano lessons, cooking classes in Florence, a fresh circle of friends…the whole schmeer. Everybody wants to change, upgrade, do better, reach higher. This would be a reality show about trying to literally save someone’s life. We all know what happens to most prostitutes, sooner or later.
The N.Y. Times has a story about her, and the Smoking Gun has a bunch of photos.
One problem that won’t go away. Her nose is too big. I always thought when you pay $5000 for two hours you should get a model off the runway in Milan or Paris. If the “Pimp My Life” show goes, throw in some plastic surgery.

The full-on Incredible Hulk trailer. Norton: “I’ve got problems…it’s a little more complicated than that.” And when he turns all Hulky, he sure isn’t green. Mostly a sandy brown with a slight greenish tint, or so it seems to me. God, do I hate that raaahhrrraaahhh! sound that post-production guys always use to convey the sound of terrible rage and energy coming from the mouth of some humungous life form.

A friend with access to huddlings in the Woody Allen camp says that in his next film (i.e., the one after Vicky Cristina Barcelona) Evan Rachel Wood will play Larry David‘s love interest. The untitled piece “is an old script that Woody wrote for himself but now he feels too old for it, so we’ll get the young sexpot Larry David,” I was told an hour ago.

Evan Rachel Wood

For what it’s worth I think the idea is kind of nervy-cool. Bizarre but why not? What with that blood-spattered Marilyn Manson sex video last year and this bizarre piece of news (which I believe is coming from a reliable place, whether or not it plans out), Wood is seeming more and more of an oddball in terms of her romantic whatevers.
My source has also seen Vicky Cristina Barcelona and says “it’s good. Not great but very good, and Penelope Cruz walks away with it. She is great in it and should wind up with an Oscar nomination. (I think.) VCB is funny and sweet and sad and way, way better then his last few movies, including Match Point.
“If [Woody] had spent just a little more time cutting it and being less lazy it could have been one of his great movies,” he claims. “Still it’s very good, and the sex scene [lesbian action between Scarlett Johansson and Rebeca Hall or Cuz or whomever] is really, really sexy. It’s so weird that Woody Allen did it.”

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It’s strange that no one has commented so far about the obvious echo factors regarding Michael Bay‘s Platinum Pictures being in negotiations with Paramount Pictures to do a Rosemary’s Baby remake. For humor’s sake, at least.

Mia Farrow in Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby

Echo #1 is that we’ve got a trade story here about a man who’s been half- jokingly referred to by film writers, editors and film fans for years as a satanic figure, and now this guy is looking to make a movie about the birth of Satan’s spawn. You don’t think that’s funny?
Nobody actually believes that Bay is literally a man-devil with horns and hooves, but he’s certainly been seen for at least a decade as someone who’s come to represent demonic forces in the film industry, a soul-less heebie-jeebie craftsman who has done more than anyone else to bring about the death of genuine spirit and heart and coherency in narrative cinema, a sworn enemy of the beliefs and ghosts of Ernst Lubitsch, Robert Bresson, John Ford and Stanley Kubrick (among thousands of others) and the mortal foe in today’s world of alive-and-well guys like Florian von Heckel Donnersmarck.
Echo #2 is all flaky ephemera and silly supposition, but throw it all together you’ve got the kind of thing that would make you gulp if you heard it in The Omen. I’m not saying it’s remotely imaginable much less anything a sane person would consider, but let’s take the Michael Bay-is-the-devil idea and advance it a notch and suppose, just for fun, that Bay is actually the son of Satan.

He was born on 2.14.65, which was when Ira Levin was writing and researching his Rosemary’s Baby novel, which was published about two and a half years later, in mid 1967. So where did the idea for Levin’s book come from? Perhaps there were demonic vibrations in the air in the aftermath of Bay’s first wail and Levin, being a typically sensitive writer who perhaps knew a little something about the occult, picked up on this somehow? Maybe he knew someone who told him, “Something has happened, I know not what.”
Clearly the editors of Time magazine felt something in the air also because in April 1966, when Bay was only 14 months old, they published their famous “Is God Dead?” essay with that magazine cover that people still remember today. Roman Polanski, director of the original Rosemary’s Baby (’68), used this Time cover for an insert shot in his film.
I’m not saying any of this makes any sense, but once you accept the fictional notion of Bay’s demonic parentage it all starts to fall into place with an oddly creepy logic. Bay’s birth, Levin begins “Rosemary’s Baby,” Time wonders if God has died, the book is published, the movie is shot and released….all in fairly fast succession.

If you go by the logic of The Final Conflict (1981), the rise of Damien Thorn (Sam Neill) is fulfilled when be becomes an adult and begins to control the levers of power in decisive ways. Bay has obviously been doing that for some time in Hollywood circles, but now, the theory goes, he’s finally reached a point where he can tell (or help to tell if someone else directs) the story of his own birth. Yes, a stupid idea but on some primal level there’s a small part of me that believes all of it.
The scary thing is that Bay and his Platinum Pictures team will almost certainly screw this one up — overbaking it, removing all subtlety and sense of dread, making it for the downmarket crowd, etc. Just like they’re certain to do when they get around to remaking Alfred Hitchcock‘s The Birds.