Day: June 7, 2010

So we’ve got the 35th anniversary of the debut of Steven Spielberg‘s Jaws coming up on 6.20. The trouble-plagued Universal release opened in 474 theatres on 6.20.75, and then expanded to 675 theatres on 7.25 — the biggest mass release of a film ever seen at the time. It earned a staggering $7 million the first weekend, and stayed at the top of the charts for the next five weeks, ultimately becoming the first pic to top $100 million domestic.

Jaws holds up fairly well, but it’s difficult to think of it these days as just a film. For years it’s been regarded (and not just by people like myself) almost as a kind of sentinel of tragedy, as extreme as that may sound. It ushered in the era of the mass-market, four-quadrant tentpole movie, and in so doing almost single-handedly (i.e., along with the success of Star Wars two years later) turned the film industry away from the idea of smallish or mid-sized movies with flavor and personality being a legitimate thing to invest in.

Jaws and Star Wars, in short, brought high-concept greed into the mix, and from this the interest of corporations in the potential for even greater profits to be made if movies could be sufficiently simplified and tailored to a younger audience. This in turn set in motion forces that wound up dumbing down movies and injecting a kind of virus into the Hollywood system that basically poisoned the whole game, leading to the ascension of tentpole auteurs and dumber plots and faster and faster cutting and hundreds of movies utilizing orange fireballs in action sequences.

This cause-and-effect has been recounted and lamented by many thoughtful chroniclers, and doesn’t need to repeated once again. But an anniversary is upon us and Jaws did do it — it let slip the dogs of tentpole hell, and movies have never been the same since.

I would probably buy a Jaws Bluray if one was available. The best DVD to own, of course, is the 30th anniversary edition that came out in ’05 which contains the full two-hour “Making of Jaws” doc, which is one of the very best of its type.

It sounds macabre to say you have a “favorite” 11.22.63 JFK/Love Field photo, but there’s something intensely creepy, for me, about the middle-aged woman with the bright red hat and the ornate glasses whom Jackie Kennedy is smiling at. I look at her and see a demon from hell, needing to meet and touch the Kennedys in order to fulfill the death curse. “It’s such an honor to meet you, Mr. President and Mrs. Kennedy. I just want you to know you have less than an hour. Is there anything I can do?”

One of the oldest inner-torment cliches is when a character wakes up from a nightmare like a jack-in-the-box — bolting upright all sweaty and pop-eyed and going “aarrgghhh!” (I’m thinking of a damp-faced Frank Sinatra doing precisely this in The Manchurian Candidate.) But I don’t recall this kind of thing being done humorously until Nicholas Stoller used a morning-wakeup scene with Jonah Hill in Get Him To The Greek.

Hill has been drinking and drugging with Russell Brand all night, and the sound he makes as he suddenly pops into semi-conscousness the next morning, lying on the couch, is classic — “Aahhrrgh!” This was probably the best laugh I got from the entire film.

I don’t drink much these days (a little wine sometimes) but I’ve been there. There’s really nothing like starting the day with a jolt and a guttural sound, which is usually because you’ve overslept and are late for work, or because you don’t know where you are. You’ve been tossing and turning for the last couple of hours, and your thought dreams are so turbulent and scattered that you suddenly break out of the sleep membrane like an animal, going “wahhrrrghh!” And then you open your eyes and slowly gather your bearings, and then you stumble into the bathroom and splash water on your face.

About 90 minutes ago Apple honcho Steve Jobs began delivering his widely-expected iPhone 4 presentation at San Francisco’s Moscone Center. “The thinnest smartphone on the planet, 9.3mm thick (a quarter thinner than the iPhone 3GS) with two built-in cameras (one on the front and one on the back with an LED flash), two mics and a noise-cancellation button. Bing offered as a built-in search engine. Display is 4 times the resolution of previous models.” It’ll be available on 6.24.

Bruce Willis‘s attempt to get past the paid-huckster thing doesn’t work. He and the writers should have ignored this and approached from the opposite direction. “I’m Bruce Willis and I know more about vodka than most Russians or Poles,” he could have said. “I fly around on private jets, I’ve been with Russian hookers, I know Russian mafia guys and trust me…or don’t trust me, I don’t care…but I know what the real stuff tastes like.”

With no one willing to even speculate about why Al and Tipper Gore recently decided to separate after 40 years of marriage, I might as well toss some lettuce leaves around.

I’m convinced that older couples don’t break up unless one of the parties is seriously fed up and wants out. It’s very easy and natural for older couples to stay together because it poses the least amount of difficulty, and because breaking up can be (and usually is) enormously stressful and traumatic. Even if things aren’t that terrific between a couple, nobody wants to go there.

So something — a situation or circumstance, I mean — has to be pretty damn intolerable to upset a comfortable 40 year-old apple cart. And most of the time — let’s face it — it’s about the husband wanting to pick up that spear and feel like a hunter again — about his wanting that “great winter romance…[that] last roar of passion before settling into [his] emeritus years,” as Paddy Chayefsky put it in Network.

Or, less frequently, it’s the wife needing more in the way of comfort and tenderness. Or about the couple just opting for a “nice civilized time-out,” which is usually a code term for one of the parties being theoretically open to something new.

I know for sure that people don’t break up after 40 years unless some kind of enormous pressure is forcing them to do so. They break up not because living apart seems like a mildly intriguing idea, but because living together has become intolerable for one of the parties, and because it’s the only solution to “the problem” that affords a certain dignity.

The fact that there’s no apparent intention to screen Sylvester Stallone‘s The Expendables (Lionsgate, 8.13) in tandem with a 6.23 L.A. Film Festival interview he’ll be doing with Elvis Mitchell is another indication (on top of that pompous trailer that posted three or four days ago) that this all-star actioner may have problems. The web page says only a “sneak peek” (a presumed reference to a product reel) will be shown.

If the film has issues (I say “if”), here’s a shot-in-the-dark guess as to why. It may be that The Expendables has too many aging-macho-guy egos to juggle, and in its struggle to give everyone a fair (or contracted) amount of studly screen time with cool dialogue and all, the rhythm of the story, as it might be or could have been, may have been been lost. Perhaps it doesn’t flow together and operate like a organic, integrated, well-oiled thing; perhaps it feels more like a kind of muscular, gun-totin’ fashion show on a runway in Milan. Again — a guess!

I’m not gunning for this film. I loved the last Rambo for its comically excessive violence and am still hoping that The Expendables will somehow work. But the notion that some kind of trouble may be afoot is definitely on the wall.

In Get Him To The Greek, Jonah Hill “looks to have expanded to Macy’s-parade balloon size since Superbad but plays the same prematurely middle-aged guy he did there.” — Time‘s Richard Corliss in a 6.3 review.

Another thing I’m late on due to recent travelling is Entertainment Weekly‘s 6.1 cover story — “The Greatest Characters of the Last 20 Years.” The fact that EW has essentially become an Eloi under-25 girlie magazine explains why some of the most intriguing characters are near the bottom of the list and some of the blandest are near the top — naturally!

HE reader Kurt Bainer explains it as follows: “Wow, talk about upside-down rankings! There are a ton of characters at the bottom who should be at the top, and some that don’t even belong on the list in the first place.

“I have no problem with Homer J. Simpson as # 1 — still going strong after 21 years — but consider the placement of the following:

“#99 — Kill Bill‘s The Bride (i.e., Uma Thurman). #95 — Jim Carrey‘s Truman from The Truman Show. #90 — Marge Gunderson (Frances McDormand) in Fargo — should be in the top 20. #85 — Daniel Day Lewis‘s Daniel Plainview in There Will Be Blood — should be among the top 15 or 20. #64 — Russell Crowe‘s Maximus in Gladiator — deserves placement among the top 30 or 40. #52 — Kathy Bates‘ Annie Wilkes in Misery — should reside among the top 10-20.

“Not to mention Kevin Spacey‘s Keyser Soze in The Usual Suspects at #37 — clearly a top-20 character. Or Vincent Vega/Jules Winnfield of Pulp Fiction at #29 — they should be among the top 15. #14 — Jeff Bridges‘ Jeff Lebowski in The Big Lebowski — should be among the top 5-10. #4 — James Gandolfini‘s Tony Soprano in The Sopranos — should definitely be #1.

“Now think about these names having been placed higher than those listed above…

“#48 — the Harold and Kumar guys; #40 — Will Ferrell‘s Ron Burgundy. #28 — Tyler Perry‘s Madea. #24 — Felicity (please). #20 — Ally McBeal (should she even be on this list?). #9 — Carrie Bradshaw of Sex and The City — deserves to be somewhere between 50th and 75th place. #6 — Jennifer Aniston‘s Rachel Green on Friends. #3 — Buffy The Vampire Slayer (Buffy over Tony Soprano?).”

I caught all but the first 20 minutes of last night’s MTV Movie Awards, and was stunned by the absence of even half-funny material throughout most of it. The show’s popularity derives from its blatant goof-off attitude and being 100% opposed to the idea of movie theatres as churches. Movies are presented instead as things you might watch on your iPhone while farting and belching during a McDonalds break. So you’d think that at least some of the routines would be at least chuckle-worthy, except almost nothing worked.

With the exception of Tom Cruise‘s Les Grossman dance number with Jennifer Lopez and Jonah Hill and Russell Brand‘s make-out session in the seats, pretty much every line and routine had a “that’s it?” quality. Nobody seemed to have the slightest clue. Time and again the show stalled and sputtered.

I said to my son Dylan, “Is it me or is almost nothing on this show even remotely funny? I mean, I’m sitting here frowning.”

It doesn’t seem to have occured to anyone (least of all the writers) that low-road wallowing is never funny unless fortified by exceptional wit, smarts, sophistication. Or political subversiveness. Or some display of outrageous, never-seen-before vulgarity or razzle-dazzle (like the Cruise-Lopez routine). Instead the show was mostly an assemblage of glittery ca-ca moments.

Will Ferrell and Mark Wahlberg dangling from wires and bitching about how it didn’t feel cool enough?

It would have been nice — change-of-pace classy — if “Best Kiss” winners Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson had simply kissed in the classic tradition. But no — they had to go with a tiresome routine about Pattinson being too clumsy to pull if off. It was awful. This plus Stewart’s cowardice over the rape remark has lowered her stock considerably.

Bradley Cooper‘s witless blathering-on as he introduced special honoree Sandra Bullock (particularly the beaming look in his eyes as he spoke of the $163 million earned by The Proposal) persuaded me that he’s a giddy and fizzy-souled showbiz whore. I began to admire Cooper after seeing him in The Hangover, but I’m off the boat now. His stupidly grinning puss had the exact opposite effect that Ben Stiller‘s Oscar show routines (the Na’vi thing, the ’09 Joaquin Phoenix parody, that great bit he did years ago with Owen Wilson) have had — i.e., he gets it, he’s cool.

And in the middle of all this Ken Jeong (The Hangover), while accepting the Best WTF Moment award, starts crying about his wife having dodged cancer? Now I’ve got a handle on the guy — he has the soul of an owner of a Monterey Park Chinese food restaurant who drives a big car and lives in a tract house.

Okay, the Jeong-Ed Helms Elton John routine wasn’t too bad. Christina Aquilera‘s light-up crotch was striking. And I was mildly aroused by the trailer for Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.

New Moon was named Best Movie, and Stewart won the Best Female Performance award for sleepwalking through it? The emptiest Eloi GenY girls would have trouble with those calls. And Zach Galifianakis won the Best Comedic Performance for playing an all-but-diaper-wearing retard in The Hangover when the general consensus is that Ed Helms’ performance stole it?

There’s a difference between taking a hold-your-nose, straight-paycheck acting job in some deplorable mainstream monstrosity (i.e., Johnny Depp in the Pirate movies, John Cusack in 2012) and having a nice little gig going with the family trade. Nearly all CG-mounted family films are atrocious (i.e., Furry Vengeance), but I’m not feeling the revulsion over Owen Wilson‘s Marmaduke voicing, despite the 11% Rotten Tomatoes rating and the weak opening numbers.

The bottom line is that Marmaduke plus Marley and Me has made Wilson the go-to GenX guy for family dog movies. If he’s smart he’ll play this like Donald O’Connor did with the Francis the Talking Mule movies in the ’50s and dog it as long as he can. Dog movies could be Wilson’s retirement fund/nest egg. Nobody watches them anyway or pays them any mind so who cares? Suck it in, do the job, take a shower.

It was reported late last week that Anne Carradine, widow of the late David Carradine, has filed the most absurd wrongful-death lawsuit in world history. The filing essentially claims that MK2 S.A., the producer of Carradine’s last film Stretch, should have hired someone to keep him from accidentally strangling himself to death while jerking off in his Bangkok hotel room.

Which is why I found a 6.4 Huffington Post comment mildly amusing, or at least in keeping with the Anne Carradine spirit: “I’m suing 20th Century Fox [for having] suffered a broken ankle, bulging discs in my neck and lower back, a sprained knee, two chipped teeth, a gash on my forehead and five groin pulls. All of these injuries occurred as a result of fleeing the theater every time the Marmaduke trailer came on (except for the groin pulls — those details are unnecessary).”