Month: May 2009

I had a smooth and relaxing late-breakfast sitdown with Star Trek director JJ Abrams about two hours ago. We’ve been corresponding four or five years but had never met so it was cool to finally do so. My being a moderately big fan of the film (I gave it an HE grade of 8.7 or 8.8 last week) along with the softly-lighted setting of the lobby of the Four Seasons hotel only enhanced the vibe.

Abrams is full of pep and positivism, and about as sharp as they come. He’s almost certainly a as much of a compulsive work fiend as yours truly (if not more so) and is one of those guys who seem preternaturally skilled at being 100% present in the room — there’s no sense that he’s keeping a portion of himself hidden — and at the same time are expert at making conversational partners feel they’re being fully listened to and focused upon.

He had a typical Jewish breakfast (salmon, bagels, cream cheese) and I had the same typical WASP breakfast (scrambled eggs, rye toast, orange juice, bacon served as volcanic ash) that I’ve been eating since I was eight years old.

I conveyed my basic feelings about the film — that it’s a reboot to the Trek franchise in the same way that Casino Royale rebooted the 007 films, that it feels well-coiled and tightly constructed, and that it’s especially successful in the sense that it leaves you just a little bit hungry (as opposed to films that make you feel you’ve absorbed too much of them). His answers speak for themselves.

I asked if long-departed Paramount production chief Gail Berman in fact “came up with the idea of doing the Star Trek prequel now arriving in theaters,” as it said in a 5.4 Brooks Barnes N.Y. Times piece. Abrams basically said yes, she did come to him and proposed a new Star Trek film, and that he answered that he didn’t want to do Star Trek #11 and wanted to get back to basics with a reboot approach and that she said cool.

We also talked technology, travel (i.e., a Star Trek screening for troops in Kuwait), kids, health and so on. I was expecting no more than a 20-minute session after a negotiation with his tough assistant; we wound up talking for about 45 minutes.

That’s not just Tom Hanks with a worried look on his face — it’s also me. Or at least a portrait of how I’m feeling. The guys in red and gray tunics and hats are journalists and Sony publicists who may be harboring secret information about a screening this week of Angels and Demons. I’m worrying about other stuff besides (i.e., most of it having to do with pre-Cannes issues), but this, right now, is certainly front-and-center.

Ron Howard‘s film is opening stateside a week from Friday (i.e., on 5.15), and of course I leave for Cannes next Monday, 5.11, and the Manhattan all-media screening is on Wednesday, 5.13, so I need to see it this week. I can always catch it on 5.13 at a commercial theatre in Cannes, but it would be so much easier to just get it over with here. Preferably in the inner-sanctum comfort of the Sony screening room at Madison and 55th.

On a scale of one to ten, how cranked are Hollywood Elsewhere readers about lining up to see this? To what extent did The DaVinci Code burn the bridges of trust? We all know what Angels and Demons will almost certainly be. The clips make it obvious. And we all understand it’ll clean up like the first one did.

Dan Brown‘s Angels & Demons novel is about some kind of threat to the Catholic belief system from the Illuminati, one of the Vatican’s ancient adversaries, etc. Hank’s ‘symbologist’ Robert Langdon is hired by the Catholic higher-ups to sift through the clues left by the Illuminati to find the “ticking time-bomb” they’ve planted under Rome. The Illiuminati “have been dedicated since the time of Galileo to promoting the interests of science and condemning the blind faith of Catholicism,” the copy says. Sounds like a plan.

A guy sent me a script of Aaron Guzikowski‘s Prisoners, which is looking like another Christian Bale-Mark Wahlberg pairing. (Their first co-venture will be in David O. Russell‘s The Fighter.) The rumor mill says Bryan Singer, whose once-formidable rep has been diminished by Valkyrie and who naturally needs to restore face, is apparently considering a shot at directing.

Prisoners is a kidnapped-kids thriller — Taken meets Gone Baby Gone meets Se7en meets the ravenous hunger of producers and distributors looking for the next big thing. It’s about monsters in our midst in at least two senses of that term, and is very tightly assembled. Wahlberg will play Keller, a blue-collar dad turned vigilante pursuer when his daughter and a neighbor’s child disappear on the night of a Thanksgiving celebration. I’m given to understand that Bale will play Loki, a hotshot detective assigned to the case. It’s set in the Boston area.

The guy who sent it to me called it “a complete page turner…I haven’t read something so original or twisted in quite some time…the comparisons to Se7en are understandable…it’s a hell of a script…if Singer ends up directing as rumored, this thing could really be something special.” I’ve read about 50 or 60 pages worth this morning. It’s a taut and muscular genre piece but so far it’s given me a little too much deja vu. It’ll almost certainly satisfy along the lines of other thrillers in this vein unless the director (Singer or whomever) screws it up big-time.

“There’s the whole notion that you need to persist in the illusion of immortality,” Tyson director James Toback recently said to Roger Ebert. “Because we say, well, yeah, but I’m not really dying because I’m going on to the next life. I don’t mean just to be cute about it, but people like that need to look at the Hubble telescope photographs and say, this is where we live.

“We are in an invisible speck of dust. ‘We’ meaning our whole solar system but if you wanna narrow it down further, our planet, and if you wanna narrow it down further, ourselves. We are almost invisible specks of dust in this great huge, vast, expanding cosmos. And once you actually say, that is what’s real, that’s where we are, then you can say, well, then what purpose is there in life?

“Well, you’re here so you make the best of it; you do what you can. You enjoy what you can, you create what you can and then when it’s time you don’t whine and you go. [Except] we’re never conditioned to think that way. It’s never taught. I mean, parents don’t teach it, schools don’t teach it, religions don’t teach it. It’s a kind of warped need to mythologize death into everything but what it actually is.”

After speaking with Toback on 4.11, I wrote that “he’s one of the most sage observers I’ve ever known, and hands down the greatest gabber — not in a blah-blah, listen-to-me-talk sense but in the vein of a guy who just knows and doesn’t believe in trimming his sails. Intimidation never seems to affect him. He doesn’t seem to know from hesitancy either. Which is why his discussions with Mike Tyson went so well, which is the main reason, I feel, why Tyson connects.”

Making a marriage work always gets difficult sooner or later, and once the hard stuff starts in there’s no going back to breezy and easy. At times summoning the strength and patience and discipline you need to get through the rough patches can be exhausting, and certainly draining. There are always farts and potholes and speed bumps along the way, and sometimes worse. I’ve been there; it’s work. Which is why I never bought all that malarkey about Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward being a more or less perfect couple.

Hollywood Elsewhere is now definitely covered as far as complimentary copies of Paul Newman: A Life are concerned. And these three don’t include the first copy I got, which I left on a bus.

Which is why I was relieved to read about Newman’s affair with journalist Nancy Bacon in ’68 and ’69. In Shawn Levy’s book, mean — Paul Newman: A Life. Which I now have three copies of.

I know Wes Anderson‘s Fantastic Mr. Fox (20th Century Fox, 11.13.) has been testing in the New York area because I was invited to a New Jersey showing several weeks ago. I tried to RSVP on the up-and-up with my own name, but they said no-go because I wasn’t from the right age group. In any case another showing of this animated stop-motion film happened yesterday and some guy who…like, allegedly attended has passed along a vaguely written impression to Nathaniel Rogers of The Film Experience.

“A beautiful union of filmmaker and material,” the guy said. “You can sense the love and reverence [Anderson has] for the Roald Dahl story while at the same time putting his stylistic stamp as a filmmaker all over it, without one overwhelming the other. It felt just like a Wes Anderson movie, only animated. Same title/caption font, hip soundtrack (though the only song i specifically remember is ‘I Get Around’ by the Beach Boys), slo-mo dance sequence.

“Only about 60-70% of the animation was completed, but i loved the look of it. I’d describe it as akin to James and the Giant Peach meets a diorama.”

The Wikipedia facts are these: (a) Joe Roth and Revolution Studios bought the film rights to Fantastic Mr. Fox in 2004; (b) Anderson signed on as director with Henry Selick, who worked with Anderson on The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, as animation director; (c) Anderson signed on because Roald Dahl is one of his heroes; (d) In adapting the novel, the story the novel covers would amount to the second act of the film ; (e) Anderson added new scenes to serve for the film’s beginning and end; (f) Selick left the project to work on the Neil Gaiman story Coraline in early 2006, and was replaced by Mark Gustafson; (g) Fox Animation Studios became the project’s home in October 2006 after Revolution folded.[10]

Wolfram Alpha, the name of a new super search engine that will debut later this month, doesn’t sound like a software application. It sounds like a New Age spiritual cult led by a German cyborg. It could be a kind of horror film directed by the ghost of Fritz Lang.

Plus “Wolfram” — the last name of the software’s creator, Stephen Wolfram — is a little hard to pronounce. Anyone with a smidgen of marketing sense would know that teenage and 20somethings are going to regard it askance. It’s a PhD dweeb name. New applications need a name that the dumbest guy in the room is cool with. They need to call it something like Vox or Drill or Vortex or Booby — a name that sounds like a rock band or a sound system.

No specific date has been given for the Wolfram Alpha launch, but it’s being described as an engine that will give you straight, specific intelligent answers instead of the usual catch-as-catch-can Google response when you ask any specific question, allegedly “in a way that the web has never managed before.”

The Independent‘s Andrew Johnson wrote yesterday that Wolfram Alpha “will take the first step towards what many consider to be the internet’s Holy Grail – a global store of information that understands and responds to ordinary language in the same way a person does.

Wolfram “introduced the system at Harvard University last week. Although the system is still new, it has already produced massive interest and excitement among technology pundits and internet watchers. Computer experts believe the new search engine will be an evolutionary leap in the development of the internet.

“Nova Spivack, an internet and computer expert, said that Wolfram Alpha could prove just as important as Google. ‘It is really impressive and significant,’ he wrote. ‘In fact it may be as important for the web (and the world) as Google, but for a different purpose.

“Tom Simpson, of the blog Convergenceofeverything.com, said: ‘What are the wider implications exactly? A new paradigm for using computers and the web? Probably. Emerging artificial intelligence and a step towards a self-organizing internet? Possibly…I think this could be big.'”

Publicist Kathleen Talbert said a while ago that Francis Coppola‘s Tetro, which will open the Director’s Fortnight program in Cannes, is in black and white and color. A slight exaggeration, it seems. There are dabs of red in the manner of Rumblefish and Schindler’s List , but the trailer is 97% monochrome.

“When a movie comes out great, I’m not even happy it came out great. I just think, ‘Wow, whoo. That could have turned out really badly, and I escaped a horrible situation.’ ” — Funny People director Judd Apatow quoted by N.Y. Times contributor Dave Itzkoff in a Sunday piece called “Funny Men With Serious Ambitions.”

I love this quote because it precisely echoes the bottom-line attitudes and personalities of many if not most comedians. Dour, glum, guarded.

“Green is good, but there is no ecological benefit in recycling intellectual properties or in treating pop-culture treasures like so much scrap material,” A.O. Scott also wrote this morning in one of the Memos to Hollywood published today. “So let us read our comic books and watch our DVDs of old movies and television shows and try to capture our imaginations with something new.

“Enough with the serial killers (unless you’re David Fincher); period dramas; movies in which children die or are endangered; (bad) literary adaptations; superhero epics; tween-pop exploitation vehicles; scenes with bubble-breasted women working the pole in strip clubs; shady ladies with hearts of gold; Google Earth-like zoom-ins of the world; sensitive Nazis; sexy Nazis; Nazis period” — Quentin Tarantino!

And “dysfunctional families; dysfunctional families with guns; suburban ennui; suburban ennui with guns; wisecracking teenagers; loser dudes scoring with hot women who would never give them the time of day even if they were drunk out of their minds or too young to know any better (hello, Judd Apatow!); feature films that should have been sketch comedy routines; shopping montages; makeover montages; bromances (unless the guys get it on with each other); flopping penises; spray-on tans; Kate Hudson; PG-13 horror remakes; or anything that uses any of the ‘classic’ songs that we are sick of hearing.”

In the view of the Observer‘s Ryan Gilbey, “the early years of Quentin Tarantino‘s career” — Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction, Jackie Brown, his screenplays of True Romance and Natural Born Killers, his pinch-hitting screenplay work on Crimson Tide — “were the most dynamic by a long chalk.”

Which makes it understandable why “some of us are eager to know what happened to the Tarantino who gave U.S. cinema a hefty adrenaline shot to the heart, much like the one administered to Uma Thurman‘s Mia Wallace.

“Perhaps the very act of expecting Tarantino to mature and evolve, or to return to the tenor of his early work, is like waiting for Wim Wenders to make a frathouse comedy. It could be that he wanted all along to devote his career to paying homage to hacks and trashmeisters. Will the chasm continue to widen between the qualities that made Tarantino’s first three movies so fascinating and the shameless, sometimes juvenile passions that drive him on?

Gilbey ends by writing that “perhaps those of us who hailed Tarantino as a cinematic revolutionary will find further support for our case this month in Cannes” — i.e., when Inglourious Basterds shows its face,

Hah! Unless it’s been transformed to something almost entirely different from what’s on the page, Inglourious Basterds is going to be, at best, an ironic World War II wankathon — a movie with a semi-sincere middle section that has a reverent, film-loving Cinema Paradiso vibe but is otherwise about archness, smugness and smirk. But in a way that kind of works. On paper, that is.

Here’s what I wrote last July after reading the first half of the script:

“While it’s easy to see why others have called it Kill Bill meets The Guns of Navarone meets The Dirty Dozen meets Cinema Paradiso, I have to say that I’m mainly enjoying it as a violent, vaguely art-filmy World War II attitude comedy — a deliberate exploitation piece full of war cliches turned on their ear, and a general theme of Jewish payback upon Nazi swine for the Holocaust.

“It is absolutely the most inauthetic, bullshit-spewing World War II movie that anyone’s ever written. And I love it for that. Every other line is a howl or a chortle. It almost could have been written by some 15 year-old suburban kid who used to play pretend WWII games with his friends when they were 10 or 11. Four or five times I literally laughed out loud, and that’s rare for me. And every scene is pure popcorn, pure shit-kickin’ Quentin, pure movie poontang.

“When I read the character name of ‘Pvt. Butz,’ a German combat soldier, I almost fell out of my chair. This is straight out of the mind of Stanley Kubrick when he called two hotel-clerk characters in Lolita ‘Mr. Swine’ and ‘Mr. Putz.’

“The Inglorious Basterds script flaunts its fakery and movie ‘tude to such a degree that it’s pure adolescent (i.e., teenage boy) pleasure. The Europe it depicts doesn’t exist and never will exist, and that’s totally fine. The German and French characters are so idiotically cliched they almost sound like the kind of material that a John Candy SCTV skit would use. But not quite. It’s actually kind of perfect that way. The balance, I mean.

“The script seems twice as fake as the Italian villlage in Blake Edwards‘ What Did You Do in the War, Daddy?, and that was pure mid ’60s Hollywood bullshit. It’s faker than Hogan’s Heroes, even. If Tarantino has done any research about France, Germany or any World War II particulars other than watch World War II movies, I’ll eat my motorcycle tool kit.

“He doesn’t care, of course, and that’s why he’s Quentin Tarantino You can feel him in his element, living in his head and flaunting a clever, dumb-ass yarn that entertains every step of the way, and — this is the cool part — in a kind of oddly sophisticated fashion. Which is what he’s been doing since Pulp Fiction.”

But the ’92 to ’97 period is over, and none of us can go home again.