Day: March 23, 2009

In a week-old interview with the Village Voice‘s Aaron Hillis, The Girlfriend Experience director Steven Soderbergh is asked if the film, a portrait of a life of a beautiful high-end Manhattan prostitute, is a metaphor for Soderbergh’s own life and career.

Sundance journalists who saw the film suggested that Soderbergh sees himself as the prostitute being paid big bucks to deliver certain high-end services and yet getting bad reviews from the movie-reviewing, buzz-spreading journalists, who are repped in the film by the sleazy Glenn Kenny character, who has it off with Sasha-the-prostitute and then pans her “performance.”

Soderbergh answers that “it’s kind of hilarious for somebody to look at that and assume I’m making some larger comment about my work — or that the movie’s an exploration of what happens to somebody when they get bad reviews. It’s not a metaphor for anything.” But later on in the interview he says, “I don’t see any difference between what Sasha is doing in the movie and what I do for Warner Bros. The character in the movie is doing what she wants to for money, and so am I.”

We’re talking superb black and white photography here. Very carefully lighted. It’s also a high-end Helmut Newtonish coffee-table book shot. In no way cheap or common. That’s a pretty good excuse for posting it, I think. I’m sitting at a Le Pain Quotidien at 7th and 58th, and I just saw it and went “whoa…okay.” Here’s to the 40-plus years.

Cindy Crawford posing for an anti-aging issue in the April issue of Allure magazine

Because Anne Hathaway was so good as a neurotic, drug-addled wreck in Rachel Getting Married, swaggering producer-mogul Harvey Weinstein has persuaded her to become officially “attached” — i.e., interested but unsigned — to play the famously neurotic, drug-addled neurotic Judy Garland in both stage and film adaptations of Gerald Clarke‘s Get Happy: The Life of Judy Garland, which the Weinstein Company has optioned the film and stage rights for.

Anne Hathaway; Judy Garland in the mid ’60s.

Hathaway also resembles the younger, unspoiled Garland of the 1940s and early ’50s, and could be made up to look like the lined, haggard and agitated woman she became toward the end of her life.

In a special Daily Beast article called “Hollywood’s Most Threatening Blog,” Kim Masters explains why Variety and the Los Angeles Times have so much to lose in their battle to bring down Deadline Hollywood Daily’s Nikki Finke. But Masters reporting doesn’t suggest, much less contend, that the Times is trying to wound or disparage Finke. Her piece is pretty much a gender-war-barricades attack upon Variety editor Peter Bart, whom she calls an “old-media dinosaur” who “doesn’t get it.”

Finke “has broken some controversial stories in Hollywood, so it’s not surprising to see her become one herself,” Masters begins. “This weekend, Variety launched an extraordinary three-pronged attack that was ostensibly aimed at blogging in general but clearly was aimed at [Finke] in particular.

“The package included a column by Bart under the headline ‘Hollywood’s Blog Smog‘ that bemoans the fact that blogs are sometimes used as weapons of intimidation by players in the industry who know how to manipulate them.

“Then there was a Cynthia Littleton article that seemed to be little more than an extension of Bart’s editorial; the headline — ‘Tempest of the Toldja! Journalists‘ — was clearly aimed at Finke because a screaming ‘TOLDJA!!’ in her headlines is one of her signatures. ‘

“And Finke was [also] blasted in a piece from columnist Michael Fleming (‘How I Got Blogged Down‘) about the difficulty of maintaining journalistic standards given the overheated online competition.

“Bart’s coordinated attack — indeed the whole whiny Variety package — sounds too much like the enraged cry of an old-media dinosaur trying to defend what’s left of its terrain.

“Whatever Finke may have to say about Variety, Bart did a lot to damage himself in one of the closing paragraphs of his column. He allows that he admires Finke’s energy and dedication while bemoaning ‘her dissing of fellow news gatherers, her personal vendettas and her use of intimidation.’ And then he continues: ‘She once attended Miss Hewitt’s classes in New York, which taught upscale girls how to be warm and cuddly. I’d like her to take a warm-and-cuddly refresher course.’

“If that line doesn’t show how profoundly Bart just doesn’t get it, it’s hard to imagine what would.”

In other words, if Finke was a guy — some kind of tough-talking, finger-poking Walter Winchell-like internet gunslinger — Bart would never have written about how he needs to watch his manners or be more respectul of his elders.

Update: Finke posted a response to the brouhaha at 2:32 pm, or six minutes ago. She discloses that on 2.27 Variety president/publisher Neil Stiles “called me saying Reed Business Information CEO Tad Smith was pushing him to discuss an acquisition of my site.” But the deal was dead two days later, she says, because Bart heard about it third-hand (from Variety-hosted columnist Anne Thompson) and threw a fit over “not [being] consulted by his overlords about the overture.”

It may sound like the wrong thing to say but this shot of Liam Neeson and Vanessa Redgrave at yesterday’s funeral for the late Natasha Richardson in Millbrook, NY., looks like a carefully composed shot (certainly in terms of lighting and framing) from a feature. Not a super-immaculate Vittorio Storaro composition but like something out of a Noah Baumbach film. One glance and you can feel it. Gray skies, somber garb, bush branches, despairing looks.

This photo alone, which sits atop a 3.22 Guardian takedown piece by Nick Adams about director-writer Richard Curtis and his latest film The Boat That Rocked (opening 4.1 in England, 8.29 stateside), has instilled serious concerns.

Gemma Arterton, Nick Frost in Richard Curtis’s The Boat That Rocked (Universal, 8.29)

Observe and Report “is not a movie about a guy who becomes a hero [but] a guy who’s decided in his own mind that he is one, all evidence to the contrary. Referring to this movie and Paul Blart: Mall Cop in the same breath because they’re both about mall cops is like comparing Straw Dogs to Babe because they’re both set on a farm.” — from Moises Chiullan‘s just-posted review of Jody Hill‘s upcoming Warner Bros. release, which is opening 4.10.

Anyone out there who believes that the Warner Bros. copy line on the Observe and Report poster is meant to be understood in this light — i.e., that Rogen’s character is delusional — doesn’t know much about studio marketing. The poster obviously isn’t taking the idea of Rogen’s mall cop being a hero seriously — the shades make it clear he’s a self-absorbed doofus — but the poster isn’t even flirting with the idea that the character may be seriously deranged in a Travis Bickle sense of the term. There isn’t a wisp of a hint of this in the poster art.

The Playlist is reporting about having spoken to a source in Austin during SXSW about Terrence Malick‘s Tree of Life undergoing additional shooting and that the film “is about a year away from completion and maybe a year and half away total.” Which means, if this turns out to be valid information, that we’re looking at a mid-2010 release.

Malick’s parallel IMAX project is said to be titled Voyage of Time. An anonymous Awards Daily commenter who claimed to be posting from Malick’s home town of Austin (but who could in fact be the great Ahmed Khan posting from Kabul) wrote earlier this month that Time will run in the vicinity of 45 minutes, that some Time footage may be used for Tree of Life, and that it’ll be released simultaneously with Tree of Life.

Clearly, Malick has an attachment to secrecy. He seems to live for it almost. To be able to work within such an utterly secret vacuum that no one is able to learn any substantive-sounding information is perhaps (who knows?) the bottom-line electric lightning-bolt element in Terrence Malick’s life and head. Secrecy! But with all the sniffing around no one, it seems, has stopped to consider the absolute lunacy of attempting to blend a story about an anxious 20th Century man (Sean Penn) and recollections of his distant father (Brad Pitt) with prehistoric pre-time elements, including a prehistoric creature sleeping in a sea of magma. Good God!

Until somebody closer to the action or someone with a professional rep with some kind of valid professional relationship with Malick spills I’m treating the whole thing as one big dinosaur wank.

“It’s over — we’re officially, royally fucked,” Rolling Stone‘s Matt Taibbi wrote last Thursday. (You can’t notice everything at the instant it happens.) “No empire can survive being rendered a permanent laughingstock, which is what happened as of a few weeks ago, when the buffoons who have been running things in this country finally went one step too far.

“It happened when Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner was forced to admit that he was once again going to have to stuff billions of taxpayer dollars into a dying insurance giant called AIG, itself a profound symbol of our national decline — a corporation that got rich insuring the concrete and steel of American industry in the country’s heyday, only to destroy itself chasing phantom fortunes at the Wall Street card tables, like a dissolute nobleman gambling away the family estate in the waning days of the British Empire.

“The latest bailout came as AIG admitted to having just posted the largest quarterly loss in American corporate history — some $61.7 billion. In the final three months of last year, the company lost more than $27 million every hour. That’s $465,000 a minute, a yearly income for a median American household every six seconds, roughly $7,750 a second.

“And all this happened at the end of eight straight years that America devoted to frantically chasing the shadow of a terrorist threat to no avail, eight years spent stopping every citizen at every airport to search every purse, bag, crotch and briefcase for juice boxes and explosive tubes of toothpaste. Yet in the end, our government had no mechanism for searching the balance sheets of companies that held life-or-death power over our society and was unable to spot holes in the national economy the size of Libya (whose entire GDP last year was smaller than AIG’s 2008 losses).”

Yesterday Variety‘s Michael Fleming posted a complain-and-lament piece (titled “How I Got Blogged Down”) about how pressure to quickly break stories online has led to sloppiness and retractions. His two prime examples are the bloggers who last week retracted premature news of Natasha Richardson‘s death (i.e., the distinction between actual and brain death having led to confusion) and Nikki Finke announcing on 1.29.08 she needed to “knock down” a rumor about ICM’s Jeff Berg departing his post after having posted a bit earlier that Berg was leaving.

“I chase film news,” Fleming writes, “[but] I regularly see half-baked stories posted, and quickly spread all over the world by sites that don’t verify them. [And] I’m troubled by a growing lack of objectivity, and an erosion of civility between competing journalists and the subjects we write about.”

One caveat is that while Fleming does chase news (like we all do) and is an excellent, thorough and fair-minded reporter, a good portion of what he breaks has been handed to him on a plate. Everybody feeds Variety with their fresh deals — there’s no more widely recognized and supported publication than Variety when it comes to this stuff — so it’s not like Fleming is out there all alone beating the bushes with a stick.

And what about the online reporters who’ve claimed to have broken stories and then seen their scoops turn up in a subsequent Variety report without any acknowledgement that they published it first? I’ve been hearing carpings along these lines for a long while now.

“Sometimes I wish there were more points of view from showbiz bloggers,” Fleming also says. “Too many of them have taken the same tone as they blur a line between objective reporting and opinion.” Who’s he talking about exactly? Why not name a couple of names and list examples of said blurrings?

“There is a preponderance of catty anonymous barbs, and bullying directed at other journalists and anyone in the industry who doesn’t play ball,” he states. Okay, but who’s bullying who over what particular issue? Playing ball regarding what activity or arena…early-bird screenings? Spit it out.

“Some bloggers seem to prize pummeling each other more than gathering news,” he observes. Yes, they do — and it’s entertaining (or at least diverting) when this happens. Fleming obviously doesn’t find it so, but what rankles him in particular? Bloggers will sometimes write about the same complaints that print journos used to privately share about each other at parties in the old days (i.e., the mid ’90s and before). The difference today is that it’s all hanging out on the clothesline 24/7.

Sometimes there are clothes out there that shouldn’t have been washed, or are too damp to air-dry, or which lack clothespins, or haven’t even gone into the washer to begin with. But one way or the other it all gets sorted out in the end. I think readers have come to understand you we all need to take almost everything with a grain of salt until the facts of life demonstrate otherwise. Depending on your POV and awareness levels, even official press releases can be fairly regarded as misleading or incomplete. Everybody spins to some degree. Nobody is 100% right or forthcoming about anything.

This Michael Fleming Variety story about Joel and Ethan Coen intending to direct their own version of True Grit (i.e., adapt the original Charles Portis book rather than remake the 1969 John Wayne film) is…whatever. Fleming mentions towards the end, however, that the Coens have “just completed” A Serious Man, which Focus Features will release in early October.

If Man is done why not take it to Cannes then? It’s late March, there’s plenty of time to put things in order…why not? Earlier this month the Coens told an esteemed director who happened to run into them that Cannes is not on their schedule Why? What would the downside be if they showed it there? A Serious Man is a starless, low-key exercise that’ll need all the hey-hey it can get.

“As Freud tells us in ‘Civilization and Its Discontents,’ we have to repress our infantile aggression in order for civilization to survive. But it’s worth paying top dollar to see those feelings acted out by an expert ensemble. And no bleating about the cruelty of farce, please. As [playwright Yasmina] Reza knows and so gleefully shows, without a killing there is no feast. ” — from John Lahr‘s 3.30 ‘s New Yorker review of God of Carnage, which I myself praised earlier this month.

God of Carnage costars Marcia Gay Harden, James Gandolfini, Hope Davis and Jeff Daniels.