The idea is for HE readers to come up with overly emphatic 1950s-era tag lines — shock! shame! defiance! never before in Hollywood history! — for present-tense films like Let Me In, The Social Network, Wall Street 2, The Town, Easy A, Case 39, Due Date, Nowhere Boy, It’s Kind of a Funny Story, etc. If you don’t know the shot with these films then please don’t submit. (Original idea inspired by this Film Experience riff about tag lines for 1950s Susan Hayward films.)
In a 9.28 DP30 interview, Client 9 director Alex Gibney explains, as his film does, that former call girl and current N.Y. Post advice columnist Ashley Dupre “did” former N.Y. Governor Eliot Spitzer exactly once. She was not his girl of choice — that role was filled by another prostitute called “Angelina.”
“You think Ashley is ‘the one‘, [but] Ashley is kind of like the woman who happened to be on call that night, or that afternoon,” Gibney says. “She’s like a sub who came off the bench, probably because Angela wasn’t available. She happened to be the one who’s on the wiretap. She’s not the one but she’s always played it like she’s the one, always deflecting, ‘it’s a legal issue, I cannot answer’ but always engaging people that she was Spitzer’s girl She was not Spitzer’s girl.
“She’s very interested in advancing her career as a celebrity and as a singer. Fox News and the N.Y. Post are very interested in using that desire for celebrity to use it to advance their agenda, which is to discredit Eliot Spitzer. It’s funny how celebrity gets used. Celebrity is a bizarre form.
“Ashley tried to play me,” Gibney recalls. “We had many email and text conversations with Ashley, and [I] negotiated wth many managers — she went through a lot of them — and we almost had a deal, but then her lawyer insisted on editorial control. I was not wiling to give Ashley Dupre editorial control.”
Two days ago L.A. Times guy Steven Zeitchik reported that Black Swan director Darren Aronofsky has “had discussions” with Superman-reboot producer Chris Nolan, This is a terrible, terrible, terrible idea. If this story (if true) doesn’t represent a diseased equation — i.e., acclaim and success from the making of a brilliant psychological thriller puts you on the short list to direct a bloated franchise flick about a superhero character whose time has totally passed and who means nothing to everyone — I don’t know what does.
“It’s over. The franchise is dead. The press killed it. Your magazine fucking killed it. New York magazine. It’s like all the critics got together and said, ‘This franchise must die.’ Because they all had the exact same review. It’s like they didn’t see the movie.” — Sex and the City costar Chris Noth speaking several days ago to Vulture‘s “Party Line” reporter.
Well…mission accomplished! All concerned should take a bow. Sometimes life does offer a happy ending. But the critics “didn’t see” Sex and the City 2? Sure thing, Chris.
Warner Home Video’s The Treasure of the Sierra Madre Bluray is the most exquisitely finessed, luscious-looking black-and-white film I’ve seen in high-def since WHV’s Casablanca. The needle-sharp detail and deep velvety blacks are magnificent. There are some dupey portions but nothing to worry about — most of it is pure pleasure. It’s so crisp and alive-looking, so perfectly honed and lighted that you can enjoy it entirely for the visual benefits alone. Which you wouldn’t want to do, of course, but I’m just sayin’.
A Toronto Film Festival interview with Let Me In director Matt Reeves that I thought I’d accidentally dumped was found today, so here it is. Middling iPhone-level video, tolerable sound, so-so chatter. But at least it wasn’t lost.
The only Star Wars film I’d like to see converted into fake 3D is The Empire Strikes Back. The best of the bunch, certainly the most handsomely photographed, etc. You can have the rest of them. And how good is the fake 3D going to be anyway? We’ve seen what it is, and that it doesn’t quite make it.
No, I’m not excerpting another Social Network rave. I’m quoting a piece of a review by Time‘s Richard Corliss because the description he offers of genius innovators like Mark Zuckerberg is sly and zingy and exactly right. The film is saying that “geniuses are abnormal,” Corliss states. “The obsessive focus that these blessed, cursed minds bring to their goals often excludes social peripheral vision. They don’t notice, or care about, the little people in their way. Zuckerberg, incarnated by Jesse Eisenberg (The Squid and the Whale, Zombieland) with a single-mindedness so cool as to be lunar, isn’t inhuman, exactly; more post-human, a series of calculating algorithms. He is his own computer code — complex, and to most of those who know him, unfathomable.”
First the Segway guy flies off a cliff and into a river and dies, and now editor Sally Menke, 56, has lost her life from a similar-type accident, possibly from succumbing to heat exhaustion and falling off a cliff (or a steep ravine) during a hike in Griffith Park. I’m very sorry. Menke was a gifted cutter and way too young.
But there’s no stopping unforeseen bad stuff in this life. I wish it were otherwise. A friend once said that the odds of leaving the planet in a quiet and peaceful way are not high. It’s a much greater likelihood that death will come either suddenly and horrifically, or at the end of a long, agonizing, painful decline from disease or age deterioration.
In the third act of A Clockwork Orange, Patrick Magee‘s agitated liberal-activist character — white-haired, ruddy-faced, excitable — is phone-chatting with a superior about the necessity of leadership. “The common people will let it go,” he says. “Oh yes, they’ll sell liberty for a quieter life. That is why they must be led, sir…driven, pushed!”
I am Patrick Magee, and this is more or less my view of the older, reputedly lazy Academy fuddy-duds. “The older Academy members will too often bypass true quality and reward films that offer the usual familiar comforts. Oh, they’ll give it all away for a calmer, warmer, more reassuring experience. That is why they must be led, sir…driven, pushed!”
Bluewater Productions has announced a forthcoming “Mark Zuckerberg: Creator of Facebook” comic book Written by Jerome Maida, penciled by Sal Field and cover designed by Michal Szyksznian, the 48-pager will be out in December.
“Who is the real Mark Zuckerberg?,” the press release asks. “The young billionaire and creator and CEO of Facebook who announced recently that he is generously donating $100 million to public schools in Newark? Or the cold-blooded businessman who walks over people to get what he wants — the way he’s portrayed in The Social Network?
The road to success, Maida says, was not preordained nor was it always a smooth ride.
“Mark was offered loads of money at a young age and turned all his suitors down because deep down he knew he had higher goals than to work for someone else,” says Maida. “Bill Gates offered Mark a million dollars while Mark was still in high school to work for him and Mark turned it down. I mean, how many high school kids will ever be made an offer like that?
“Rightly or wrongly, Mark dealt harshly with some people on his way to where he is today”, says Maida. “As we see, he left many people feeling betrayed. I try my best to be fair here. No one is totally innocent in this story. I try to represent each of the major players’ point of view.”
From 11:30 am to 1:30 pm I took part in a press luncheon/schmooze session at Manhattan’s Essex hotel for the forthcoming Bluray of William Friedkin’s The Exorcist (due 10.5). It was pouring outside and the Bluray hadn’t been sent out (it won’t be ready until 9.30), but it was very cool to chill and shoot the shit with Exorcist writer-producer William Peter Blatty, dp Owen Roizman, costar Linda Blair and sound designer Chris Newman.
Where was Friedkin? Upstairs and hanging around (he dropped by for a quick hello and a photo-pose with Blatty) but he didn’t sit down for whatever reason.
I especially enjoyed watching the first 30 or so minutes of the Exorcist Bluray on a large plasma screen. I haven’t seen it look this good since I forget when, and I just like watching first-rate movies under first-rate conditions. The Exorcist Bluray looked extra-cool, I thought, because it was shown through a 240hz frame-rate converter, which lent an almost video-like clarity to the image.
There’s a special digital screening of the film happening tomorrow night at MOMA.
