Month: March 2009

This Funny or Die fake trailer for a movie called Gobstopper premiered at SXSW earlier this week without anyone being told it was a joke. Essentially a cross between Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and Saw, it features a demented Willy Wonka (Christopher Lloyd) terrorizing a group of teens that come to visit his Chocolate Factory. Here’s the website for the fake film.

Is it as funny and/or outrageous as the “giving head” scene in Reanimator (which is what it reminds you of right away)? Uhhm, no. The stand-out visual element is Lloyd’s yellow teeth. Were they yellowed for the trailer, or are they naturally that way? A tiny bit icky either way.

The four leads are played by Zach Gilford (Friday Night Lights), Paul Rust (I Love You, Beth Cooper), Martha Maclsaac (Superbad), and Nicky Whelan. Paul Sheer (Human Giant) and Wee Man (Jackass) also appear.

Screen International‘s Barry Byrne, filing from Madrid, has given Pedro Almodovar‘s Broken Embraces a mixed-positive (or a positive-mixed) review. “A lavish, noirish melodrama sparkling with Almodovar’s trademark humor, the film will thrill his loyal fanbase but perhaps leave a more general public dazed rather than dazzled,” he says.

“Ravishing in its artifice and outfitted with all of Almodovar’s stylistic tricks, this tale of desire, power, duplicity and fate is self-consciously steeped in noir conventions and provides Penelope Cruz with a sleek post-Oscar vehicle.

“[And yet] the director can’t quite bring himself to treat his characters with the Olympian detachment noir usually demands. Characters in the Almodovar universe can’t do deadpan delivery, and perhaps throwing in the towel, Almodovar deliciously parodies the typical Veronica Lake-Alan Ladd repartee when he has the lip reader interpret what they’re saying in a marvellous monotone monologue.

“Yet ultimately, Almodovar doesn’t seem comfortable in the cramped noir world of the Madrid film studio and mansion he has built for his pawns, and the second half of the film sees the characters flee to the wide open spaces of the island of Lanzarote. There, the film slips into lush, romantic melodrama against a bleak volcanic landscape.

“With the action moving ponderously towards a baffling denouement, we enter the terrain of high melodrama – sensational revelations and narrative twists. In the midst of all this, there’s an over-long clip from the quirky comedy film-within-a-film.

“It’s symptomatic of the strain in Broken Embraces, which sees the clashing genres of noir, melodrama and comedy vie for supremacy, but it’s a rollicking struggle that, in the hands of consummate ringmaster Almodovar, is a joy to watch.”

Hal Ashby‘s Bound for Glory screened at the Aero last night as part of a “Kevin Thomas‘ favorite movies” series, and an HE correspondent reports that the panel discussion that followed — a confrontational psychodrama between a bizarrely behaved David Caradine, the somewhat more moderate Ronny Cox and dp Haskell Wexler, and an all-but-invisible Thomas — turned into a “near-riot.”

Bound for Glory star David Carradine, moderator Kevin Thomas, dp Haskell Wexler, costar Ronny Cox.

“Carradine, very probably high on something, made some anti-union statements and got into a shouting match with someone in the audience,” he says. “Cox at that point walked out, and that’s before things even got good. Carradine threw a mike toward the audience so a lady questioner could speak, and the mike accidentally hit American Cinematheque publicist Margot Gerber on the head.

“Then Carradine started insulting Wexler’s cinematography, at length. ‘You got an Oscar for ruining my movie,’ Carradine kept telling him. Wexler finally got into it, agreeing that, yes, Hal Ashby had fired him one day, and that he’d responded about the massive amounts of coke being snorted on the set, which got him unfired. Then Carradine denied doing coke with Ashby but defended directors who like their powder — including Quentin Tarantino! [WIth whom Carradine worked on Kill Bill.]

“After some more back-and-forth shouting Carradine broke into a singalong of the title song, with the audience’s nerves too frayed for much of anyone to join in.

Here’s an mp3 containing part of the discussion. If you listen closely you’ll hear Carradine referring to Tarantino as a “coke freak.”

“It was a little like a real-life Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf,” the observer says. “It never dawned on me that I could be recording this on my iPhone till nearly the end, but I did get some of it. Someone was taping it for the Cinematheque, and I’d pay a hundred bucks for that video, but I bet it’s already been locked away in a vault somewhere.

“The best part was good old Kevin, who got in about 10 words during the entire 70 minutes, and who never did a thing to try to stop any of it, which any sane or halfway effectual person would have.

“As somebody said afterward, it was ‘a perfect storm‘, combining combative panelists (and some partially combative audience members) with history’s most passive moderator. The only staffers there seemed to be about 20 years old and unsure whether to try and stop it themselves or not. It was unnerving and thrilling.”

An American Cinematheque rep tells me it was all taped (video and audio) so that’s something to look forward to.

Some AICN dude named Rollofellow caught a research screening last night of Paul Greengrass‘s Iraq War drama Green Zone, which stars Matt Damon, Jason Isaacs, Brendan Gleeson, Amy Ryan and Greg Kinnear. The bottom-line remark comes at the end of his review when he says he “enjoyed this talky film, dense as it is. To be fair, one really can’t say it’s confusing because it’s very clear in its points. I’d just advise you all to drink a lot of coffee before you sit down to watch it.”

Dense, not confusing, talky, drink a lot of coffee…? Sounds like a beautiful symphony to me. Seriously. To hell with the Transformers crowd who find complex realism a chore. Seriously.

Based on Rajiv Chandrasekaran‘s “Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq’s Green Zone,” the film is “about the search for WMD across Iraq,” he says, “which at this juncture seems like a bit of a moot point (we know there weren’t any) but this movie is well made at every level if a bit too dense and talky in parts. Its worth seeing just to watch how it all went so wrong.

“Damon plays a military guy named Roy Miller, running an ops party searching for WMD. But after many a bloody gun battle, Damon’s team makes it into the supposed WMD sites to find nothing time after time. When he reports to his superiors back in the ‘Green Zone’ (the lush area where American officals live within Bagdhad) to tell them that their intel is consistently off, he’s immediately censured and told to simply follow orders.

“At this point we check in with Bush Administrative official Greg Kinnear who is busy plotting to install a new government to be hand-picked by America themselves. Meanwhile, CIA agent BrendanGleeson is fighting with Kinnear as all American intel (which we know is all wrong) has been given by one single source: some mysterious figure named Magellan.

“Soon enough, Damon and Gleeson team up to uncover this fraudulent Magellan character as well as the search for the real location of WMD. If you know your current events you will know the giant” reveal that comes halfway through the movie. If you don’t, I’m not gonna be a spoiler.

“Greengrass is always a first-rate director and the movie plays like Black Hawk Down with an incredibly intricate political mystery at its core. It’s a lot to take in: action movie, mystery, political and social commentary. And I will probably have to go see it again to absorb all it was throwing at me.

“Damon is always great. Never playing righteous, more just frustrated that his missions are all bullshit and he knows he’s being lied to. Kinnear has always annoyed me so I guess he’s well cast as a bureaucratic asshole here.

“An interesting character is Amy Ryan’s Wall Street reporter, who is always over Kinnear’s shoulder waiting to interview this mysterious Magellan (whom he always keeps just out of reach). When Damon finally corners her, we realize she’s literally been quoting someone she’s never met (taking it all from Kinnear instead) therefore she and the WSJ are indeed complicit in this false reasoning for going to war. In an effort to get the scoop first, reporters were printing anything they were spoon fed.

“I enjoyed this film, dense as it is. To be fair, one really can’t say its confusing because its very clear in its points. I’d just advise you all to drink a lot of coffee before you sit down to watch it.”

“There are transcendent film experiences, and there are the rare among those where at the end, you quietly say ‘Jesus’ to yourself under your breath and then turn to a friend next to you who caps it with ‘Christ.’ The Hurt Locker is the first great film of 2009, and would have been among the great of ’08 had it been released then.” — from Moises Chiullan‘s South by Southwest report.

An erupting undersea volcano near Tonga “has been shooting smoke, steam and ash thousands of feet into the sky above the South Pacific ocean,” says an AP story. “Spectacular columns are spewing out of the sea about 6 miles from the southwest coast off the main Tongan island of Tongatapu. Authorities said Thursday the eruption does not pose any danger to islanders at this stage, and there have been no reports of fish or other animals being affected.”

The volcano aside, the most commonly known aspect of life on Tonga is that almost all the natives are lardbuckets. And yet it’s not true that there are more fat-asses per square mile in Tonga than in any other country. An article on TVNZ says that Tonga is actually “the fourth fattest nation on earth, with 90.8% of people in the country overweight. There is no social stigma [about] being big, with obesity traditionally associated with high social status and wealth.”

An official e-mail has confirmed that Up, the new 3D animation film from Disney-Pixar and director Pete Docter (Monsters, Inc.), will be the opening-night film of the 62nd Cannes Film Festival. The Disney Digital 3D will be shown to the press on the afternoon of Wednesday, 5.13.09, and to the formally dressed lah-lah crowd that evening. Up has been co-directed by Bob Peterson, who toiled as a screenwriter and author of Finding Nemo.

If you know your mafia movies or your Sopranos, you know that occasionally a major character — a respected person of some power, be it a capo, soldier or significant girlfriend — will suddenly appear weakened or made to look bad by a series of events, and there’s a feeling in the air — nothing you can put your finger on exactly, apart from a vague uh-oh vibe — that he/she could be whacked.

This is what’s going on right now with Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner. I’m not saying he’s a dead or even a marked man, but he’s definitely whackable at this stage of the game, President Obama’s statement of support notwithstanding. He may still be the Treasury Secretary next month or next year or three years from now, but there’s a sense right now that Joe Pesci went down to the basement last night (or the night before last) to look around for the ice pick.

People are furious at the symbolism of the AIG bonus thing — it symbolizes the whole cozily corrupt culture between Wall Street, the Feds, the executive branch and Congress — and the bottom line is that Geithner couldn’t muster the resolve to eyeball his AIG pallies and them “no way and no how” on the bonuses. He took the advice of a damn lawyer that it wasn’t the government’s business to renegotiate or “abrogate” business contracts. You never listen to lawyers when there’s a moral/ethical imperative that needs to be faced….never!

A 3.19 N.Y. Times article about the turmoil surrounding Geithner, written by Jackie Calmes, says that “the mixed messages on A.I.G. gave further ammunition to critics who had begun questioning Mr. Geithner’s credibility as the administration’s point man on the economy, an essential commodity if he is to help restore consumer confidence.

“Fair or not, questions about why Mr. Geithner did not know sooner about the A.I.G. bonuses and act to stop them threaten to overwhelm his achievements and undermine Mr. Obama’s overall economic agenda. Edward M. Liddy, chief executive of A.I.G., told Congress on Wednesday that he generally deals with Fed officials, figuring they would keep Treasury informed.

“The controversy comes as Mr. Geithner is about to announce details of the restructured bank rescue program, and it clouds prospects for more rescue funds that the administration is all but certain to need.

“Mr. Geithner’s once-heralded credentials with Wall Street were already marred by false starts in revamping the Bush administration’s bank rescue program, even as his perceived closeness to financiers — he is the former president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York — and unease with populist politics left Main Street skeptical.

“On Wednesday, a junior Republican in Congress and some traders on Wall Street went so far as to call for him to quit or be fired. The Republican leader of the House, Representative John A. Boehner of Ohio, told a conservative talk-radio host that the secretary is ‘on thin ice.'”

“When Natasha Richardson and Liam Neeson met on the set of a Broadway play, the chemistry between them was so apparent the production became the hit of the season,” the The Independent‘s Ian Johnston begins his hail and farewell piece about Richardson, who died yesterday at age 45.

The following anecdote has been, for me, the best passage of all the obits because it reveals a bit of who Richardson really was deep down, and how she expressed herself when it came to matters of intimacy — i.e., straight from the shoulder.

“Neeson had a reputation as a bit of a Lothario after relationships with Julia Roberts, Helen Mirren, Brooke Shields, Sinead O’Connor and Barbra Streisand,” Johnston writes, “and his encounter with Richardson in Eugene O’Neill‘s Anna Christie in New York in 1993 could have ended in just another name on his list.

“But Richardson, the daughter of the director Tony Richardson and the actress Vanessa Redgrave, ensured that their relationship blossomed into one of Hollywood’s most loving.

“She kept ringing Neeson until he agreed to take the part in the play, even though he knew he was in the running for the lead in Schindler’s List. When the play’s run ended, he had to leave immediately to film in Poland.

“On Richardson’s birthday, he sent her a last-minute fax message from Poland that was flippantly signed ‘lots of love, Oskar’ — i.e., his character’s name. Richardson responded with typical directness: ‘This is like a letter from a buddy. What is our relationship?’

“Forced to make a decision, Neeson realized where his heart lay. And Richardson, effectively deciding to leave her then husband, the director Robert Fox, flew to Poland to join him.

“The gossip columns had a field day, but Richardson said they jumped the gun. ‘When everyone assumed it, we actually weren’t at that point,” she recalled. ‘We fell in love later. Well, he certainly fell in love with me later.’

“The couple married in 1994 and their son Micheal was born the next year, followed by Daniel in 1996.

“‘What turns me on about a woman,’ Neeson once said, ‘is if she’s an individual or has some talent. If she has both she’s worth remembering.'”

The recently posted British trailer for Stephen Frears‘ hailed adaptation of the Colette novel, written by Christopher Hampton and costarring Michelle Pfeiffer, Rupert Friend and Kathy Bates. Miramax’s domestic release date in 6.19.09.

I’m prohibited from saying where I was in midtown Manhattan from 3 to 6 pm today, but it was very cool hanging out and watching it all go down. One day I’ll be able to reveal the particulars. I’m not trying to tease or play games, but I so love this iPhone photo that I’m figuring it can’t hurt to post it. I love that it reveals absolutely nothing and yet prompts an inevitable “what the…?”

Talk about your lying one-sheets; this lobby card makes Steve McQueen look like some Euro stud from a Radley Metzger film.

Ditto, 2:25 pm.