Month: June 2010

All right, somebody needs to find the Criterion staffer who thought up the rabbit clue in the latest newsletter and slap him around. The words “WUV’ and “ATE” on the rabbit’s fingers are obvious allusions to “LOVE” and ‘HATE” tattooed on Robert Mitchum‘s fingers in Charles Laughton‘s Night of the Hunter, meaning that a Criterion DVD/Buray of this 1955 classic is in the works.

Why a rabbit in the first place? Because rabbits are frequently hunted or something? No, some guy says in the thread. Mitchum’s nickname as a kid, he claims, was “Robbie the Rabbit.” Sure thing.

Presumably the footage titled “Charles Laughton Directs Night of the Hunter,” that two-hour look at rushes and outtakes that were part of almost eight hours worth of footage that Laughton’s widow Elsa Lanchester donated to the AFI, and which UCLA helped to restore, will be a part of the package. I saw a good chunk of this footage in Los Angeles, although I forget where and when. A couple of years ago, I think, at the Billy Wilder in Westwood or at one of the American Cinematheque houses.

I’ve always winced at the moment in All The President’s Men when the actor portraying Kenneth Dahlberg says “I…uhm, I gave the check to Stans” and Robert Redford pauses and goes, “Beg your pardon?” As if to say, “Whoa…did you just spill the big beans?” One should never express excitement when a source has revealed something big. That’s like jerking too hard on the fishing pole after getting a nibble. If anything, you should indicate that the just-revealed info is almost yawn-worthy, or certainly no big deal. Otherwise you could scare them off.

Jonah Hex has been ripped to shreds by critics — a 5% positive from Rotten Tomatoes creme de la cremes and a 12% positive from the hoi polloi. I saw it a couple of days ago in a jam-packed Warner Bros. screening room, and it was like “oh, I see…it sucks but not that badly.”

I realize what I’m supposed to think and feel. I don’t know what’s wrong with me but I couldn’t feel the hate. I got through it and never felt anything stronger than “okay, this isn’t much but it’s not agony to sit through.”

Expectations are everything. I was prepared for something truly awful and rancid, so when it turned out to be merely mediocre — a familiar supernatural “eastern” (much if not most of the action happening along the eastern seaboard and climaxing in Washington, D.C.) that moves along from episode to episode in a heavily CG-ed but reasonably sufficient way, I almost felt placated.

Of course, someone reading this is going to pay to see Jonah Hex and…whatever, become enraged at its awfulness, and then turn around and blame me for saying it was okay. I’m not saying that. It’s a moderately bad film. I’m saying that somehow I managed to watch it without gagging.

It contains echoes of Civil War trauma — feelings of betrayal, the need to settle scores, unresolved rage, etc. — and in so doing seems to be about psychological war wounds in general, which gives it a certain something or other.

Josh Brolin‘s half-dead Jonah is a chip off the Clint Eastwood /”Man With No Name” block — he’s got that gruff, grizzled, greasy hard-boiled thing down pretty well. Megan Fox, to my considerable surprise, isn’t all that bad as Lila, the two-fisted, gun-totin’ prostitute who doesn’t wear too much eye makeup. Michael Fassbender‘s perfomance as Burke, the chuckling Irish-hooligan assistant to John Malkovich‘s Turnbull, the film’s chief baddie-waddie, is spirited and high-sprung.

Friends tell me Jimmy Hayward’s film dishonors the original comic-book series — i.e., isn’t as well written, has invented stupid/inane material, lacks basic intrigue, etc. Okay, fine, no arguments. I couldn’t care less about either property. I’ll probably feel the same way about Cowboys and Aliens.

Speaking as a semblance of a spotlight guy with two sons in their early 20s, I find it cruel and despicable when tabloid reporters and gossip-mongers dive into some private aspect of a life of a kid solely because of parentage — i.e., a famous dad or mother (or both). It’s difficult enough for a teenager to sort things through without the media vultures peering in and commenting and digging for strands.

Whatever the truth of the matter, most of us presumably understand that exploring a trans-gender lifestyle or even crossing the surgical Rubicon can, given the particulars, constitute a healthy step in the right direction, as the Larry Wachowski/Chastity Bono situations have indicated. I wouldn’t have mentioned this, but it’s out there and snap-crackling and there’s no putting a cap on it.

I have only three concerns about George Gallo‘s Middle Men (Paramount, 8.6), which is selling itself as a kind of Goodfellas of the internet. One, it wrapped shooting in late ’08 — what’s been the holdup? Two, it closed the 2010 Santa Barbara Film Festival, which I attended, and I didn’t hear zip about it from anyone. And three, Luke Wilson really needs to work out and get himself back into Family Stone shape.

These are my concerns, but there’s also the issue of Gallo himself — a member in good standing of Hollywood’s eccentric authentic goombah cool cat-from-back-east club. He had a good run from ’86 through ’95 when he wrote scripts for TV’s Wiseguys and Matin Brest’s Midnight Run and Bad Boys, not to mention his direction of 29th Street (’91), a reasonably decent New York drama. But not much has happened over the last 15 years, and I just don’t trust him at this stage — sorry.

Here’s a red-band trailer:

Comparison between one-sheets for Anton Corbijn‘s The American and Alan Pakula‘s The Parallax View unapologetically stolen from Ryan Adams‘ posting earlier today on Awards Daily. HE reader C.C. Baxter has suggested another inspiration — the poster for Steven Soderbergh‘s Traffic.

The trailer below surfaced about six weeks ago. Clooney’s assassin character is clearly anxious, bothered — his face shows a lot of anxiety in more than few scenes. Here’s an apparently new trailer that includes dialogue between Clooney’s character and a priest about morality, “good cause” and God’s approval or lack of.

The Parallax View (1974), an eerie thriller, was about feelings of pre-ordained doom. Haunted by doubts about the shootings of John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King and George Wallace, and by the Watergate scandal, it’s always been my personal favorite among Alan Pakula‘s “paranoid trilogy,” which began with 1971’s Klute and ended with 1976’s All The President’s Men.

By “personal favorite” I don’t mean I believe it was the best of the trilogy — that would be All The President’s Men, I still feel, with Klute, the Manhattan-based Jane Fonda-Donald Sutherland thriller about a sexually-tinged killer, running a close second. Parallax had a slightly fuzzy, less-than-fully-resolved quality — a little ramshackle at times. It used a slow-motion shot of a flying car.

But it had the creepiest mood spray of all three. It exuded that anxious and unsettled atmosphere that seemed to permeate the mid ’70s, a weird socio-political haze that everyone refers to these days as a rote thing (“The ’70s, of course!…queasy stomachs all around!”), but at the time wasn’t fully sensed or shared. (This mood also informed, in a slightly different way, Sydney Pollack‘s Three Days of the Condor .) It was rooted in a vague suspicion that all kinds of malevolent political criminality was being perpetrated by amoral operatives in shades and suits. Parallax really does feel like a murder-thriller blended with some kind of slow-brewing anxiety attack.

The story follows an investigation by a nervy reporter (Warren Beatty) into the Parallax Corporation, a shadowy, corporate-mannered organization that focuses on finding Oswald-esque malcontents to pull off political killings.

As long as we’re on the subject, here’s the Parallax Corporation’s psycho-nutjob-itchy-trigger-finger indoctrination video, which is shown at the end of Act Two.

Some other clips:

Deputy sheriff: “You know, for a moment there I thought you were a man. But you’re not, are ya?” Beatty: “No, I’m a girl.”

Toy Story 3, which some critics are equating with the Second Coming, is currently responsible for 67% of advance ticket sales on Fandango. It could be the worst film of the summer and it would still be up there. Family audiences just want that thing that they always pay to see.

I’ve decided to train it down to BAM Cinematek this afternoon to catch a 4 pm press screening of Jules Dassin‘s The Law (1960), which was released in this country as Where The Hot Wind Blows with some of the steamier footage removed. I’ve never seen that version or the uncensored one, which is screening today (as well as commercially at BAM later this month, of course).

I’m of two minds about a certain quote from a certain actress. On one hand it indicates spirit and erotic pizazz. On another it could be what a not-quite-Meryl Streep-level actress might say if she’s concerned about the ebbing of her natural radiance, especially if it peaked about 10 years ago:

“I’m primal on an animalistic level, kind of like, ‘Bonk me over the head, throw me over your shoulder…you man, me woman.’ Not everybody has the right kind of primal thing for me…I love physical contact. I have to be touching my lover, like, always. It’s not optional. I’m always traveling for cock. You’ve got to go where it is.”

I find that the less I think about Cameron Diaz, the better I tend to feel. I liked her as much as I’m ever going to like her in In Her Shoes, but that was pretty much it. I’ll be making an effort to roll with Knight and Day as much as possible this evening, and not let this get in the way. I’m going to do everything I can, in fact, to suppress it.

Rep. Joe Barton‘s “$20 billion shakedown” comment begins at 1:37 and concludes around 4:12. The man actually said “I apologize” to BP CEO Tony Hayward for the Obama administration’s recent pressuring of BP to promptly compensate Gulf-area businesses damaged or ruined by the oil spill.

Update: Barton, slithering worm that he is and always will be, has formally apologized for apologizing to BP. [Posted from iPhone at 7:05 pm.]

http://firstread.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2010/06/17/4524162-barton-retracts-apology-to-bp