Year: 2010

In a piece that ran yesterday (3.12), Toronto Star critic Peter Howell declared that “of the many conspiracy theories advanced for why The Hurt Locker beat Avatar at the Academy Awards, the only one that holds water is based on terrified actors.

“The actors’ branch is the largest single bloc amongst the academy’s nearly 6,000 voters,” he reminds, “and the thinking goes that flesh-and-blood thespians balked at giving Best Picture to a movie that triumphantly featured computers over humans. A vote for Avatar, rightly or wrongly, was viewed as a vote to put yourself out of a job.”

Not to take anything away from Howell, but he’s echoing a suspicion that The Envelope‘s Pete Hammond had reported about three days earlier, having spoken to various older thesps at a pre-Oscar party last weekend.

Update: Howell has told me he resents an implication that he may have borrowed the idea from Hammond’s column without giving credit, which, being a totally respected pro, he always does when appropriate. He didn’t see Hammond’s column, he says, and based his piece on “discussions with real live sources.” I only meant to point out that Hammond was the first to run an interview-supported article suggesting that the actors killed Avatar‘s Best Picture shot — that’s all. Nothing more than that.

You can’t fully trust Variety‘s Joe Leydon when it comes to South by Southwest reviews. He’s a Houston guy, of course, and I for one have always sensed a certain local-pride spirit in his writings from this Austin-based festival. He also tends to go too easy on genre crap. And so I’m processing his rave review of Matthew Vaughn‘s Kick Ass (Lionsgate, 4.16), which had its big SXSW debut last night, with a degree of suspicion.

This despite an HE friend insisting via e-mail that Kick-Ass “is the real deal — trust me. Maybe a little too wanting to be controversial with the Hit Girl character but this is going to be very big. Cage hasn’t been this good in ages. The movie is a huge crowd-pleaser and more clever than the masses could ever imagine.”

“Kick-Ass most certainly does,” Leydon begins. “Equal parts audacious dark comedy, wish-fulfillment fantasy and over-the-top, tongue-in-cheek action-adventure, Matthew Vaughn’s bloody funny adaptation of a cult-fave comicbook series manages to be sufficiently faithful to its source material to please fervent fanboys while remaining easily accessible for ticketbuyers unfamiliar with the superhero storytelling conventions

“Vaughn (Layer Cake) and co-scripter Jane Goldman satirize as well as celebrate. Scenes of hilariously overstated violence perpetrated by an 11-year-old girl doubtless will discomfort many and incense quite a few. But this deservedly R-rated Lionsgate release should nonetheless score a knockout in theatrical and homevid venues.”

“Deservedly” R-rated? I think we all know what that means.

I know a bit about Vaughn from Layer Cake, at least to the extent that I know that he’s not exactly Mr. Subtle — i.e., he likes to lather it on and then some.

I’d be into the Robert Rodriguez–Nimrod Antal Predators (20th Century Fox, 7.9) if I was even half-persuaded that Predators will be to the original Predator what James Cameron‘s Aliens was to Ridley Scott‘s Alien — i.e., faster, more intense, emotionally grounded, a general uptick.

But of course, that can’t be. Not with Rodriguez’s B-movie aesthetic defining the perimeters. I respect Antal (Kontrol, Vacancies), but the fact that Rodriguez played Big Alpha Kahuna at last night’s South by Southwest preview tells you it’s basically his film. Wall Street Journal/Speakeasy‘s Eric Kohn filed a report early this morning about the event.

There’s almost nothing in the filing about about Kick Ass, which also screened last night. All Kohn says is that it’s “a vibrant take on the superhero movie genre.” That’s it? In other words, it’s a ho-hummer, a disappointment? It sure sounds that way because his next line says that Rodriguez’s Predators preview “stole the show.” That’s a little bit of a review, no?

Kohn’s full-on Kick Ass review is forthcoming.

Indiewire‘s Anne Thompson called it “a nasty hard-R superhero spoof designed to outrage and delight. And it will destroy at the b.o. when Liongsate opens it in two weeks.” “Nasty”? “Designed to outrage”? In other words, lacking in wit, cleverness, refinement. Sure sounds that way. Made for the animals.

I’ve run my share of typos on Hollywood Elsewhere. Hell, they happen every other hour. And I fix them as quickly as I can. When I spotted this Robert Rodriguez-related typo in a 3.12 Anne Thompson/Indiewire posting from South by Southwest, I knew she’d catch it sooner or later. And she has. But if she hadn’t I would have said that the proper phrasing should have been “he shat out both Predators and his own Machete,” etc.

I laughed, of course, because Rodriguez does shit his films out, like all genre wallowers who want nothing more than to operate from their cheesy little comfort zone.

We’ve all felt instant attractions to certain actors and actresses, and we’ve also felt instant repulsions. I was walking down Eighth Avenue yesterday when the one-sheet for She’s Out Of My League (Dreamworks, 3.12) caught my eye, and…I’m going to let readers guess which one of these dudes I took an instant dislike to. (Hint: not Jay Baruchel.) It was a kind of reverse thunderbolt sensation, and it involved no logic whatsoever. One look at that idiotically dorky smile and I knew.

A recent Criterion newsletter has included this visual clue for the officially un-announced but reportedly forthcoming Criterion Bluray of Terrence Malick‘s The Thin Red Line. If I’d written the caption I would have had the lion say, “I’ve never met a leaf I didn’t like.” That, at least, would directly allude to TTRL rather than “feelin’ red and blu.” A red lion doesn’t need to state the obvious.

Recently whacked Variety film critic Todd McCarthy has officially joined the notoriously dweeby New York Film Festival selection committee. Already in place, of course, are program director Richard Pena, NYFF associate director (and ex-LA Weekly film critic) Scott Foundas, Melissa Anderson and Dennis Lim. McCarthy told me a few days ago he’ll go to Cannes in this new capacity.

“If you ask a conservative Republican, you are likely to hear that Barack Obama is a skilled politician who campaigned as a centrist but is governing as a big-government liberal. He plays by ruthless, Chicago politics rules. He is arrogant toward foes, condescending toward allies and runs a partisan political machine.

“If you ask a liberal Democrat, you are likely to hear that Obama is an inspiring but overly intellectual leader who has trouble making up his mind and fighting for his positions. He has not defined a clear mission. He has allowed the Republicans to dominate debate. He is too quick to compromise and too cerebral to push things through.

“You’ll notice first that these two viewpoints are diametrically opposed.

“You’ll, observe, second, that they are entirely predictable. Political partisans always imagine the other side is ruthlessly effective and that the public would be with them if only their side had better messaging. And finally, you’ll notice that both views distort reality. They tell you more about the information cocoons that partisans live in these days than about Obama himself.” — from David Brooks‘ 3.11 column in the N.Y. Times.

Two recommendations-from-vested-parties pop through in Pete Hammond‘s final “Notes on a Season” column (until it resumes late next fall) — one about Anne Hathaway‘s already-praised performance in Ed Zwick‘s Love and Other Drugs, and the other about Brad Pitt‘s in Terrence Malick‘s The Tree of Life.

Hammond reports that the Zwick film, which will open during the 2010 Thanksgiving holiday, screened for select Fox executives on the 20th Century Fox lot Tuesday night. Fox co-chair Jim Gianopulos told him “it’s in remarkably good shape considering it doesn’t come out for nine months,” adding that he “would be stunned if Hathaway does not receive a nomination for this. She’s stupendous in this role. Jake [Gyllenhaal] is also very good.”

Last weekend Hammond spoke to Apparition chief Bob Berney about the Malick film, “which will be released the beginning of November but very likely to show up in Cannes well before that.

“[Berney] says the movie is like a dream and [that] Malick fans are going to be extremely happy. He also raves about Brad Pitt’s performance comparing him to Robert DeNiro in This Boy’s Life.” According to Berney people are going to see a side of Pitt they haven’t seen before.” In other words, he rants and raves and gets violent with his kids, and thereby screws up the son played by Sean Penn in his adult years.

My cryptic, sometimes emotionally brusque father went through a lot of bad stuff as a Marine Lieutenant in the South Pacific (Guam, Iwo Jima) during World War II, so you’d think I’d be at least half interested in HBO’s The Pacific, which will debut on Sunday, 3.14.

Curiously, or perhaps not so curiously, I’m not. Maybe because I’d rather not contemplate the source of many of my own emotional difficulties that came about due to my dad’s combat-influenced nature and personality (which included booze until he went into the program in the mid ’70s). That or there’s something about US-soldiers-vs-the-Japanese movies that I’ve never found very compelling. I can think of three exceptions: The Thin Red Line, The Bridge on the River Kwai, Heaven Knows Mr. Allison. Or maybe it’s just something to do with the Pacific region and malaria and spindly coconut trees and tall grass and crazy Japanese soldiers holed up in caves. I don’t know exactly.

That said, Alessandra Stanley‘s NY Times review of what I presume is the first two or three episodes sounds encouraging.

Barack and Michelle Obama hosted The Pacific producers Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg plus some HBO brass and Congresspersons and whomever else for a White House screening last night.

It would be wonderful to read in a Bob Woodward book some day that Obama took Spielberg off to a corner and said, “So what’s this I hear about you pussying out like a little girl with your Abraham Lincoln movie? I’m a Lincoln man from way back and I don’t get it. What, are you afraid of making another Amistad-type film and people shitting all over you…is that it? Let me tell you something. People have been shitting on you for years already for wimping out on this thing. I read Hollywood Elsewhere and I know what goes. And now you can add me to the agitate roster.

“I know you were a big Hilary supporter to begin with so let’s not crap around. Full disclosure and all that but I’m going to do what I can to shame you and if necessary fuck you up in any way I can in order to persuade you to pull the trigger on this movie. Are we clear on this? Fine. You didn’t know I was liike this, did you? Well, it’s a well-kept secret, I guess. Talk to me in private and I’m Lyndon Johnson. Or I’m starting to be him, I think. A change is coming over — I can feel it.”

“Last night I saw Sex and Drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll, the Andy Serkis/Ian Dury biopic,” a friend writes. “Although it opened in the UK two months ago to generally good reviews, I’m not sure of US distribution or if anyone here really cares.

The flick is quite good, and Sirkis gives an award-worthy performance,” he opined. “It goes a bit maudlin and overboard on the polio aspect — Dury spent part of his childhood at a home for the disabled — and gets a little Oliver Twist-y in parts. It also uses animation in some transition/montage scenes that recall (500) Days of Summer.”

There’s are reasons, I’m sure, why no US distributor has picked this film up, and why it never played Sundance, etc. I’d love to know what they are. Here’s a guess — selfish, self-destructive rock ‘n’ roll debauchery is not dramatically interesting or compelling. It can be argued, in fact, that it tends to be rather boring.

Yesterday I visited the midtown Manhattan office of AnyClip, a soon-to-launch movie clip-finding site that locates and plays clips (plus dialogue transcripts plus the usual data) from almost any film ever made in the history of human endeavor using only anecdotal or fragmentary information. It’s the smartest film- or dialogue-finding site I’ve ever surfed in my life, bar none.

The AnyClip team (l. to r. rear): Aaron “Chris” Cohen, Aaron Morris Cohen, Nate Westheimer, Matt Lehrer; (l. to r. front) Aaron Fisher Cohen, Gabi Mereilles.

It’ll be up and rolling on March 15th (i.e., Monday morning), concurrent with a visit by the AnyClip team to South by Southwest this weekend and early next week.

With any luck or pluck AnyClip will soon be a major go-to site for film buffs of any stripe, right up there with IMDB and Amazon and Wikipedia, because it’s propelled by what may be the most brilliantly designed movie-and-dialogue-locating software ever coded or created.

I’m not exaggerating — this site can find any friggin’ movie under the sun using any sort of incomplete or half-assed information. Title, stars, costars, dps, directors, whatever…but most impressively, dialogue fragments. And when it strikes paydirt it brings up corresponding clips and pages of dialogue plus rental/purchase links.

I tried to stump the software several times during my chat with co-founders Aaron Cohen and Nate Westheimer, and I beat it only once when the system couldn’t recognize a line from East of Eden. But that’ll soon be taken care of. I forget how many films they’ve stored and referenced so far, but we’re talking thousands upon thousands. The tech team began with broadly popular titles and movie stars, etc., and are working their way through less well-known, more esoteric fare as we speak.

The technological base of AnyClip is located in Israel, and the whiz-kid software designer is a guy named Maor Gillerman, who wrote this morning in an e-mail that he’s “an avid reader of Hollywood Elsewhere since Mr. Wells’ dissection of the Coen Brothers’ No Country For Old Men two years ago.”

The idea behind AnyClip is to engage casual viewers who are curious about this or that film (or who are looking to investigate a flick they vaguely remember in terms of a line of dialogue or a character or an actor, but can’t recall the title of) and prompt them to go to NetFlix or Amazon and rent/purchase. That or just surf around on this site for hours and waste your entire day.

It’s the same subtle suggestion technique I’ve personally succumbed to dozens of times while browsing at West LA’s DVD/Laser Blazer — i.e., deciding to rent or buy Groundhog Day or Out of the Past on the spur of the moment because it’ll be playing on the store monitors, and watching a certain scene or hearing a piece of dialogue puts me in the mood.

I’m not entirely up to snuff on all the search terms and devices, but I know you can find movies with almost any dialogue ever mouthed by any actor since the days of Lewis Milestone and Howard Hawks. And not just the generic, well-known quotes from famous films (“Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn”) but just about any line at all, or even a fraction of one.

AnyClip.com co-founders Aaron Cohen and Nate Westheimer with a poster composed of AnyClip search terms from The Howards of Virginia….kidding!

I told Westheimer to type in “what can a man do with his clothes off for 20 minutes?” and wham, AnyClip found it in four seconds — i.e., the Chicago hotel-room scene between Cary Grant and Eva Marie Saint in North by Northwest. It also found every film in the history of the universe that has used that line, or a portion of it. It covers the entire waterfront with every search.

There’s a minor line that Groucho Marx says to a steward in Night of the Opera — “Hey, turn off the juice before I get electrocuted!” AnyClip found A Night at the Opera like that, and a clip from that particular scene plus other films and scenes that used the words “juice” and “electrocuted” — it’s really amazing.

I could go on and on and on, but that’s the gist of it. Oh, yeah, there’s a Blu-ray searching software that they’ve also come up with in which you can search a Bluray you’re watching using this and that term. I didn’t respond as strongly to this as the dialogue-search thing, but fine, cool, good to go.

And just to reiterate: there are three AnyClip guys named Aaron Cohen — bossman Aaron Morris Cohen plus Aaron “Chris” Cohen and Aaron Fisher Cohen. Here’s a video about the army of Aaron Cohens that inhabit the greater New York City area or the tri-state area or whatever.