Month: June 2009

Could 500 Days of Summer be the first film in which Joseph Gordon-Levitt doesn’t give a twitchy, mannered, off-tempo performance and actually passes for semi-normal? Are we witnessing a temporary moratorium on affected humanoid actorishness? I for one am disappointed. I go to JGL movies to experience irritation and annoyance to such a degree that I start twitching and convulsing and finally walk out. I missed 500 Days of Summer at Sundance, but I have a feeling…no, a belief I’ll probably make it to the end.

You can walk around barefoot in Los Angeles but not in New York. Eccentrics do whatever they want anyway, but you really can’t pad around shoeless and sockless in any of the five boroughs. I never did this in Los Angeles in all my years there, not once, but one thing I like about that town is that if you do the barefoot thing it won’t seem all that weird — you can get away with it.

Only a fraction of the critics have written reviews of Tony Scott‘s The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3, but it’s disturbing nonetheless that so far it’s only got a 43% positive from Rotten Tomatoes. (Metacritic only has three reviews.) Due respect to New York‘s David Edelstein but his review feels like a crab-head thing for no persuasive reason.

For what it is the movie works. It’s superior to the 1974 Joseph Sargent original. The lead characters played by Denzel Washington and John Travolta have more going on inside than their ’74 counterparts (played by Walter Matthau and Robert Shaw) and their performances — especially Travolta’s — have more facets and jazz notes.

If I was in L.A. I’d be catching Monday evening’s showing of William Wyler‘s The Little Foxes (’41) at Hollywood’s American Cinematheque. Mainly because I’ve never seen it but also because Gregg Toland‘s cinematography uses some of the same type of deep-focus compositions that he created for Citizen Kane. The film is being co-presented with the Pasadena Playhouse’s theatrical presentation of Lillian Hellman‘s play (5.22 to 6.28) with Kelly McGillis (Witness, Top Gun) in the Bette Davis role.

I’ve had a certain Little Foxes anecdote in my head for years — the only one anyone’s ever heard about the film, I’ll wager. Director Billy Wilder was lunching with producer Samuel Goldwyn, the story goes, and learned of his intention to make a film version of the Hellman play. Wilder told Goldwyn he might want to think twice due to the play being extremely caustic and Goldwyn replying, “I don’t care how much it costs.” You’ve heard it, right?

Mordecai Richler‘s review of A. Scott Berg‘s Goldwyn biography claims it was a “studio editor” and not Wilder who prompted the Goldwyn comment.

“So since The Hangover has now been crowned #1 for last weekend with a take of $44 million, don’t you think it’s time to retire its status as a sleeper hit?,” a publicist friend asks. “This is all semantics but hasn’t it entered the realm of a straight-up blockbuster? To me, the all-time sleeper hit is While You Were Sleeping, which in the spring of ’95, never took in over 11 million on any single weekend on its way to an $81 million cume. The Hangover is certainly a surprise hit, but I don’t think anyone has been sleeping on it for quite a while.”

Vanity Fair‘s Julian Sancton has carefully compared Todd Phillips‘ Old School and The Hangover. and concluded that The Hangover is “pretty much an Old School sequel. The names and faces have been changed, but the structure is almost identical.”

Here’s Nikki Finke‘s reporting about the real-life origins of the Hangover script/project.

About ten days ago I ran a short comparison piece about The Hangover‘s Zach Galifianakis vs. Humpday‘s Joshua Leonard — similar faces, physiques (okay, Galifianakis is bulkier), attitudes and personalities, and the exact same beard (except for Zach’s being darker than Leonard’s, which is light brownish). Except last week I saw The Hangover and I re-saw Humpday last night, and there’s really no comparison — Leonard is by far the funnier and more charming of the two, and a much more fluid and readable and charismatic actor.

Humpday‘s Josh Leonard, The Hangover‘s Zach Galifianakis.

Galifianakis doesn’t have that much of a role in The Hangover. He’s playing the overweight man-child fingerpaint jerkoff, shuffling around in his underwear with his big pot belly making one-note cracks and acting like he’s 14 or 15, no older. Plus he has a higher-pitched voice that doesn’t have a whole lot of flavor or feeling. Leonard is developmentally arrested as well (stuck in his early to mid 20s) but he has this smooth buttery seductiveness and a lot of mirth and b.s. and oozy charm. He also seems compulsively, naturally honest. His character is that way, I mean, but Leonard himself seems to have a kind of unpretentious natural-dude thing going on. He’s a little like Owen Wilson, only warmer.

Liam Neeson is holding his nose and and holding out his hand as he negotiates with 20th Century Fox to costar in a Joe Carnahan-directed feature version of The A-Team. Variety‘s Michael Fleming informs that Neeson would play Col. John ‘Hannibal’ Smith — the role played by George Peppard on the ’80s TV series. Bradley Cooper is also talking about playing Lt. Templeton “Faceman” Peck.

Ridley Scott is producing with Jules Daly and series creator Stephen J. Cannell, with Tony Scott exec producing through Scott Free. Carnahan and Brian Bloom [have] polished a script by Skip Woods, whose recent script credits include G.I. Joe: The Rise of the Cobra and Wolverine.

I don’t know how old this is but Liquid Generation has assembled a 200-second Oscar-telecasty video featuring 100 of the best known (which is to say the most overused and over-referenced) movie-dialogue lines. It’s very depressing to think that some think that these lines represent the best that Hollywood screenwriters have churned out over the last 80 years. The mentality behind this video is so Broadway tourist/shopping-mall/shmuck-level.

I’d love to see…I don’t know, a ten-minute video of the 100 wisest, wittiest and most penetrating (or pithy or dazzling and emotionally resonant) lines. I’ve come to really hate lines like “you had me at hello” — fuck you! Although I found it fairly satisfying, truth be told, when I first heard it in Jerry Ma-fucking-guire.

The only constantly disappointing thing about the Canon S5 is the way it always makes everything look lighter and brighter than it actually is. Nature hit the dimmer switch and dramatically turned down the light levels just before this morning’s rainstorm hit — around 8 am. It became so so dark that cars had their lights on, and I swear the sky had a kind of greenish hue to it. But the camera makes it look like it’s noontime in Riyadh.