Awards Daily ‘s Sasha Stone and myself all alone this time, talking about Limitless, The Beaver, Sucker Punch, France, beaters, the shortfalling of The Lincoln Lawyer and so on. Here’s a non-iTunes, stand-alone link. (Sorry for the underlying feedback hum sound.)
HOT GOTHY GRRLZ skimpy-hot outfits Matrix-y parallel dream world slowmo bullet-time plus shakycam catering to ComicCon fanboyz emo goth kids wake me shake me.
As I understand it, The Lincoln Lawyer came in fourth this weekend, earning $13,400,000 in 2707 theatres, for two Matthew McConaughey reasons. One, he sells tickets only to female fans of his crappy romcom movies. And two, he has zero cred with those who like semi-serious, relatively well-made films. The second group may have known about Lawyer‘s good reviews, but they probably said, “Yeah, okay….Netflix.”
Two days ago Vulture‘s Kyle Buchanan asked some people if McConaughey can make the transition from romantic-comedy and Surfer Dude crap to more substantial films.
The Lincoln Lawyer is “pulp, for sure, but it’s the most compelling McConaughey has been in years,” he wrote. “[So] it’s possible, with Lincoln Lawyer, Dallas Buyer’s Club, and a reunion with his Dazed and Confused director Richard Linklater (in the dark comedy Bernie) on the way, that Hollywood’s most famous beach bum has finally put on a suit and grown up.”
You need to wait until 2:30 for the good stuff: “One of the reasons nothing gets done is that one of the political parties puts much more into fantasy problems that real ones.”
I finally sat down and watched the Almost Famous Bootleg Bluray, and it hasn’t diminished a bit since I last caught it on DVD. What a seriously great (and unfortunately unseen, for the most part) rock ‘n’ roll heart movie. Chock-full of sly, luscious, lived-in performances, led by Phillip Seymour Hoffman‘s great Lester Bangs and, on the sub-supporting level, Jimmy Fallon‘s road manager.
And I’d completely forgotten that Rainn Wilson (33 when it was shot in ’99) and Jay Baruchel (17 during filming) had significant small roles. And I was reminded once again by Kate Hudson’s just-about-perfect performance as Penny Lane career what a quarter-inc-deep tragedy her career has been since.
Fallon: “‘Cause if you think Mick Jagger is still gonna be out there trying to be a rock star at age 50, you’re sadly, sadly mistaken.”
Here’s hoping again that We Bought A Zoo, the currently rolling feature from Almost Famous director-writer Cameron Crowe, pans out.
Jennifer Lawrence will play the feisty and combative Katniss Everdeen in Hunger Games! Which will be directed by Gary Ross! Every last site, it seems, has been reporting, repeating and re-phrasing this announcement as if it…meant something. Why is always left to me to call a spade a spade with these things, or least throw in some perspective?
Hunger Games: The Movie will almost certainly be an acceptably mid-level romantic dystopian Rollerball action melodrama by way of Death Race 2000, Logan’s Run, The Running Man, Battle Royale and The Long Walk. It’ll be the same ritualistic, hazily-motivated crap, tailor-made for young sensation junkies and the don’t-know-any-betters. It’ll be nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing…nothing.
Yes, it’ll probably make good money and might even become a three-picture franchise, but when have those things ever mattered in the great scheme? It shoots in the spring and comes out on 3.23.12.
I recently ordered a DVD of a flagrantly bad film — Roger Vadim‘s Pretty Maids All In A Row (’71) — just so I could check out a brief, nothing-special nude scene with Angie Dickinson, who’ll turn 80 later this year. Dickinson au natural is why I also own Big Bad Mama (’74) — another stinker. Dickinson was never much of an actress. And she only made two good films in her life, Rio Bravo and Point Blank.
I’m not proud of this but at least I’m being honest. It feels a little bit weird that I’m confessing to the same Dickinson longing that Dominic Chianese‘s Corrado Soprano spoke of two or three times on The Sopranos, but I might as well cop to it.
The Van Gogh sky plus Owen Wilson strolling along the Seine in this Midnight in Paris poster is a pleasant thing. But shouldn’t it suggest that Woody Allen‘s latest (which will debut at Cannes in May) is an ensemble piece of some kind, or at the very least a somewhat-troubled-relationship-at-a-crossroads story between Wilson and Rachel McAdams?
“Early Sunday, the sound of anti-aircraft fire and screaming fighter jets echoed across Tripoli, punctuated by heavy explosions,” reads David Kirkpatrick, Steven Erlanger and Elisabeth Bumiller‘s 3.19 N.Y. Times story about the combined American, British and French air strikes against the government of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, “unleashing warplanes and missiles in a military intervention on a scale not seen in the Arab world since the Iraq war.”
There are some who moan and frown and condemn when hostilities of this sort break out (like Michael Moore), and others, like myself, who strangely love the greenish flashing nightlight and the sonic kaboom and the coordinated splendor of expensive technological aggression. Plus the target is a genuine scumbag. Plus it’s Barack Obama‘s first big main-street shootout of his own and, I would argue, America’s first right-minded, semi-supportable military maneuver since…when? Plus it’s not the start of another land war but some kind of strategic rock ‘n’ rumble.
“I love it…God help me but I love it so.” — George S. Patton.
