Day: May 6, 2008

Possibly as a result of catching yesterday’s Oprah tribute, Sumner Redstone has amended his position on Tom Cruise (or told his wife to stop kvetching) and has been laying down a welcome mat in hopes that a Mission: Impossible 4 might happen down the road. (S.R. and Cruise dined together in March, it says here.) “I consider Tom Cruise a great actor and a good friend,” Redstone said during a business conference in South Korea. “And if Paramount decides — and they will make the decision — to move ahead with him, I will not object.”

The Swedish Hancock trailer is supposed to be ruder than the American one? The beginnings and middle of both are pretty much the same. I’m not sure about the final thirds.

First, those stories about Heath Ledger/Joker dolls fetching $50 a pop on e-Bay don’t appear to be valid, as this e-Bay page makes clear. Second, 6″ Joker dolls are for eight year-olds. Serious collectors prefer the more detailed 12″ or 15″ tall models with their much better facial likenesses.

Either way, this is the first action figure I’ve wanted to own in a long time. I’ll admit it — it’s partly the macabre aspect of a dead actor being sold as merchandise. I have a James Dean doll at home. I’ve also had four Universal-crafted classic monster dolls on my desk for the last three or four years — the Wolfman, Dracula and two Frankensteins (one modelled on Boris Karloff‘s appearance in the original 1931 film, the other a copy of his look in James Whale’s Bride of Frankenstein).

No article has filled me with more trepidation and suspicion about Hancock than last Sunday’s N.Y. Times piece by Michael Cieply. It’s supposed to be about a superhero flick that pushes limits in terms of the main character’s behavior, but all I got out of it were a bunch of pretending-to-be-concerned-or-thoughtful comments from a lot of smug over-paid people who ride around in pricey cars.

I really don’t like that photo of producer Akiva Goldsman laughing uproariously while standing next to Will Smith. Too many people laugh in that man’s presence. Smith himself,now that you mention it, laughs and smiles too much also. I just don’t like the vibe coming off this film. The trailer was half-appealing, but Cieply has killed the vibe.

The Indiana/North Carolina basics: “At stake are a total of 187 pledged delegates — 115 in North Carolina and 72 in Indiana. Polls open in North Carolina at 6:30 am and close at 7:30 pm. In Indiana, most polls open at 6:00 am and close at 6:00 pm, but because some parts of the state are in the Central Time Zone, the official poll closing time is 7:00 pm eastern.
“And just to give you a sense of where the candidates think they’re the strongest, Clinton will hold her Election Night rally in Indianapolis, while Obama will hold his his in Raleigh, NC. Interestingly, however, Clinton seems to be on the upswing in North Carolina, and Obama seems on the upswing in Indiana. Yet both are likely to win on their ‘home’ demographic courts.
“So what would the Vegas lines be today? Our guess: five points in each state, which should already be considered a perception victory for Clinton. But given the closet superdelegate support Obama seems to have, he’s been given the benefit of the doubt with some if he simply wins North Carolina by, well, about five points. You’ll know it will be a mediocre to bad night for Obama if his campaign has to talk about who won the most delegates tonight, rather than by how much they won each state.” — from MSNBC’s “First Read” rundown, which arrived in my inbox at 9:14 am.

Indy 4 director Steven Spielberg recently told N.Y. Times contributor Terrence Rafferty that “he tries to cut as little as possible” in the Indy action sequences because “every time the camera changes dynamic angles, you feel there’s something wrong, that there’s some cheating going on.” Precisely. Too many movies feel like visual cheats from the get-go. So Spielberg’s goal is “to do the shots the way Chaplin or Keaton would, everything happening before the eyes of the audience, without a cut.”

Sounding a little bit like Werner Herzog, Spielberg explained that “the idea is, there’s no illusion; what you see is what you get. My movies have never been frenetically cut, the way a lot of action is done today. That’s not a put-down; some of that quick cutting, like in The Bourne Ultimatum is fantastic, just takes my breath away. But to get the comedy I want in the Indy films, you have to be old-fashioned. I’ve studied a lot of the old movies that made me laugh, and you’ve got to stage things in full shots and let the audience be the editor. It’s like every shot is a circus act.” Brilliant. I love this. No more Spielberg bashing until further notice.

“That’s a fragment of something Andrei Tarkovsky said. He said that art is different than life because art is a representation of life and therefore it doesn’t contain death. Life contains death. So making art is life-affirming. So even if the art is tragic, it’s still optimistic. There can never be pessimistic artists, there can only be mediocrity.” — from John Del Signore‘s 5.5 piece for the Gothamist about Lou Reed and Julian Schnabel discussing Berlin, a film about Reed’s 2006 revival performance of his 1973 album at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn.

Berlin will open in Manhattan at Film Forum on July 18th. (Who’s the publicist? I’d love to be able to see it this week sometime.) The Schnabel-Reed sitdown concluded the Tribeca Film Festival’s “Conversations in Cinema” series.

A movie is only as good as its weakest creative link — as clever or knowing or visually alive as the stodgiest, most old-fashioned, least-hip person in the inner creative circle. So if it turns out that there’s something a little bit wrong with Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull — something a wee bit underwhelming about the story, something rote or cornball or ill-considered — we all know who the big Blame Guy is probably going to be. This is so widely understood I don’t even feel the need to say his name. I presume it’s obvious I’m not talking about Steven Spielberg or screenwriter David Koepp.