Month: March 2010

“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.

NBC muscled Larry David, Madonna and Ricky Gervais to sit in front of an audience for The Marriage Ref and make cracks about some banal-bizarre reality clips? David/Madonna/Gervais are brilliant, highly driven, high-demand people with enough money to fill warehouses, and they sat for a reality-show equivalent of The Hollywood Squares? This is close to surreal.

Green Zone‘s “pathological wish to thrill delivers diminishing returns,” writes New Yorker critic Anthony Lane. “It gave better value in the Bourne films, which, for all their low moods, were fired by basic fantasy, whereas the excitements of Green Zone sit uneasily with its examination of the real and recent past.

“The credits say that it was inspired by ‘Imperial Life in the Emerald City,’ Rajiv Chandrasekaran‘s nonfictional account of life within — and beyond — the Green Zone, but the book’s task was to unearth a fiasco, its comedy so black and dense that you could pump it out of the ground.

“Many filmmakers would have leaped at the textural contrast between life on the street and the sheen of unreality inside what Chandrasekaran calls Baghdad’s Little America, but Greengrass is too caught up in the hero’s quest to notice.

“The fact that Green Zone begins with a bombing raid should come as no surprise. Greengrass made two of the Bourne films and United 93, and his attitude to the average viewer remains that of a salad spinner toward a lettuce leaf. You don’t so much watch a Greengrass film as cling on tight and pray.

“The zone of the title is the enclave from within which the Coalition Provisional Authority tried to govern Iraq after the war, in 2003, and our hero is Chief Warrant Officer Roy Miller (Matt Damon). Boy, is he a hero: fit, pensive, rough when required, and so unceasingly moral that, on entering the hotel room of a blond, unaccompanied American reporter named Lawrie Dayne (Amy Ryan), he engages her in a constructive discussion of journalistic sources and then — I can still hardly believe this — he leaves. No shock, no awe, no combat-calming sex. All he wants is truth.

“Miller heads a unit that, in the wake of the invasion, is told to seek out weapons of mass destruction; with hindsight, we realize that he might have had more success looking for live unicorns, but there you go.

“What lends the film its grip and its haste is also what makes it unsatisfactory, since the end result of Miller’s hectic hunt is to ‘solve’ the puzzle of W.M.D. ‘If you pull this off, you might just save the country,” a CIA agent (Brendan Gleeson) tells him, but that is a fantasy more lurid than anything in the Bourne franchise.

“One of the charges against the Bush Administration was that it sought to encase Iraq in a narrative far too naive and restrictive for any nation to bear; and, in its small way, Green Zone, a left-wing movie that looks and sounds like a right-wing one, suffers from the same delusion. The story of American involvement, in the eyes of this film, is neither a monstrous folly nor a patient, difficult path to democratic peace. It’s a wrap.”

This wildly absurd, sexually provocative Lady Gaga music video — a hot-lesbos-in-prison and a Beyonce/rat poison thing — is called “Telephone.” Directed by Jonas Akerlund-as-Quentin Tarantino, it premiered just before the Oscars. High-style, in-your-face stylistic flamboyance, etc. It simultaneously aroused and dead-bored me.

Where would Lady Gaga be without the 1.2 pounds of mascara and eyeliner she puts on each eye? I chuckled at the dick-rumor joke.

Everyone claims to like babes-behind-bars B movies, but I can’t think of one made since Jonathan Demme‘s Caged Heat that I’ve been able to even watch for its entirety, much less enjoy. Where is the lesbian prison movie that delivers the quality of Robert M. Young and Miguel Pinero‘s Short Eyes?

I don’t understand why reviewers are tippy-toeing around the Big Third-Act Revelation of Remember Me (Summit, 3.12) when they’re all writing “largely set in the summer of 2001” or words to that effect. With the story happening in New York City, what else could those seven words suggest? It’s not “largely set in the summer of 2000” or the summer of ’02 or ’04…please. I knew dead cold how this movie would end before I walked into the theatre. (And my walking out before the end is immaterial.)

So N.Y. Times critic Manohla Dargis giving the game away at the end of her review, particularly in her explanation of the film’s rating, is hardly a big spoiler…c’mon. Especially coupled with her calling the finale “shamelessly exploitative.”

25% of those who selected the most anticipated Oscar-level flicks of 2010 on Sasha Stone‘s awardsdaily.com put Chris Nolan‘s Inception at the top of the list, followed by Terrence Malick‘s The Tree of Life, Derek Cianfrance‘s Blue Valentine (forget it), Darren Aronofsky‘s Black Swan and Joel and Ethan Coen‘s True Grit.

Except Stone didn’t even list Ed Zwick‘s Love and Other Drugs, which some believe may be an awards-level contender as least as far as Anne Hathaway‘s performance is concerned…hello?

N.Y. Times “Media Decoder” David Carr‘s commentary on Variety‘s whacking of chief film critic Todd McCarthy is worth a listen. The assessment isn’t startling, but there’s something about Carr’s delivery that makes it seem extra-sage. I hate the Times‘ mule-headed policy of being…what, the last major news org/website that refuses to provide embed codes?

Maybe a bit too restrained and stagey here and there, but the diminishment of the combatants and indeed the fight itself through mostly wide-angle long shots (with only a few medium close-ups) made for a classic fight-scene-with-a-point. Love those gouges and cuts. The punches sound pretty good too; ditto the exhaustion and labored breathing. “All I can say, McKay, is that you take a helluva long time to say goodbye.”

Here’s that CNN article I was interviewed for the other day about Gabourey Sidibe‘s acting-career prospects. It’s nicely written. The author is Breeanna Hare.

I’m sitting next to a couple of twenty-somethings at a Starbucks on Eighth and 50-something, and I’ve been listening to them talk for last 40 or 45 minutes, and it never ceases to amaze how these guys, whom I almost regard as a separate species, all submit to the exact same mall-speak fascism in which there are no declarative sentences but constant questioning tones, as if the speaker is basically saying “is it okay if I say this? Because I don’t want to seem overly assertive…so is it, like, okay?”

And so instead of saying “I walked into that asshole’s office and told him if I didn’t get a raise I’d quit”, the GenYs say “so I, like, walked into his office? And said, uhhm, if I don’t, like, get a raise I’ll have to, you know, quit?” It’s pathetic. They’re all a bunch of Zeligs. If I was Absolute Dictator I would round them all up and put them in evening speech classes, and the first lesson would be that you really don’t need to feel uncertain or hesitant or in any way submissive when speaking a declarative sentence. Tens of millions of under-30s constantly speak with this questioning tone, as if they were all cloned by the same Mengele. It’s freaky.

And yet my two boys (21 and 20) don’t talk this way, and neither does Zoe Kazan. Wait, does Kristin Stewart speak like this? No, it couldn’t be.