Day: April 15, 2011

TheWrap‘s Josh Weinstein is reporting that Ryan Gosling is in talks to costar with Johnny Depp in Jerry Bruckheimer and Gore Verbinkski‘s The Lone Ranger for Disney…which I presume is going to be some kind of big-budget western wank. What else could be expected from the guys who teamed on the first three Pirate pics?

I don’t want to get all cranky on a Friday afternoon but this strikes me as one of the most laughable and pathetic sell-out prostitute gigs by an exceptionally expressive and widely respected actor in Hollywood history. It’s not unlike Montgomery Clift agreeing to costar in a big-budget Roy Rogers musical directed by Mervyn LeRoy after making From Here to Eternity, or Marlon Brando agreeing to play Tarzan right after On The Waterfront.

Everybody takes paycheck money (including me), but “Ryan Gosling as the Lone Ranger” is truly ridiculous…an act of self-mockery.

The first thing I noticed this morning was that Janet Grillo‘s Fly Away, which I’d been planning to see sooner or later, has an 88% positive on Rotten Tomatoes — technically the highest rating of all the narrative films opening today. Only eight top-tier critics have posted reviews so take the rating in context, but I still felt excited and freshly enthused about seeing it.

Had I been invited to a screening or been sent a screener? Nope.

Fly Away is about a divorced mom (Beth Broderick) dealing with a daughter (Ashley Rickards) afflicted with Asperger’s Syndrome. It’s inspired by Grlllo’s own life to a certain extent as she and ex-husband David O. Russell (The Fighter) have been co-raising an autistic son, Matthew, who’s now 15 and, she says, “emerging out of autism.”

She calls the film “personal but not autobiographical…not a soggy melodrama or movie-of-the-week” but “a love story between a parent and a child.”

N.Y. Times reviewer Jeanette Catsoulis more or less agrees, calling Fly Away “a defiantly unsentimental look at the complex codependency between a harried single mother and her severely autistic daughter.”

I’ve known Janet since my period of employment at New Line Cinema’s Manhattan office in the mid ’80s as a freelance publicist. She was a development and then a production executive at the company. In 1992 she married Russell, whom she came to know initially from working on developing Spanking The Monkey (’94); they divorced in ’07.

Most of Grillo’s time and energy was devoted, once Matthew’s autistic condition surfaced, to raising her son in the late ’90s and over the last decade. But she gradually got back into film by exec producing Autism, The Musical and directing two shorts — At The Beach with Lucinda Jenney (’07) and Flying Lessons (’08), which starred Dana Delany.

(l.) Janet Grillo and (r.) costar Beth Broderick during filming of Fly Away.

Fly Away is the feature that grew out of Flying Lessons.

Fly Away was shot it in June and July of 2010. Grillo finished cutting it last November, and the film premiered at SXSW last month. (Where I missed it…naturally.) I’m planning on seeing it tonight or sometime tomorrow or Sunday at the Laemmle Muisc Hall on Wilshire.

“There’s been a 53% increase over the past decade in diagnosing autism,” Grillo states. “That’s why it’s important to tell this story. 500,00 kids with autism are now reaching adulthood, and most of them will never live independently.”

Her son has been “emerging” out of autism largely due to a therapeutic boarding school (i.e., the Glenholme School in Washington, Connecticut) that he’s been attending in recent years. The effect has been “transformative,” she says, and yet it’s “just one place…we need 1000 Glenholmes in this country.”

Does anyone have PDFs of George Clooney and Grant Heslov‘s Ides of March script, Will Beall‘s Gangster Squad or Richard Curtis and Lee Hall‘s script for Spielberg’s War Horse? Because a script pally is offering to swap these for copies of Eric Roth‘s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, Andrew Niccol‘s Now (i.e., formerly I’m.mortal), Alexander Payne‘s The Descendants, and Steven Knight‘s chef project, among others

There’s been a certain disparity of opinion so far about Paul Feig‘s Bridesmaids (Universal, 5.13). SXSW geek critics found it brilliant, hilarious and innovative, but Variety‘s Joe Leydon trashed it. Universal won’t show this Judd Apatow-produced pic to critics and online columnists until early May, but they’re been screening it for editors and feature writers.

Written by Kristen Wiig and Annie Mumolo, Bridesmaids is about feuding bridesmaids played by Wiig and Rose Byrne (Damages). Maya Rudolph plays the bride. Melissa McCarthy, Jon Hamm, Matt Lucas, Ellie Kemper, Dianne Wiestand, the late Jill Clayburgh and Chris O’Dowd costar.

“Wiig delivers a career-best performance that proves she can do much more [than] sketch comedy and funny characters,” wrote /Film‘s Peter Sciretta . “I’d be shocked if Wiig isn’t nominated for Best Actress in a Comedy/Musical at next year’s Golden Globes (a la Emma Stone/Easy A). McCarthy also kills in every scene she’s in.”

Bridesmaids “takes the Apatow formula and applies it to a film populated by funny women,” Sciretta notes. “I’m sure it will be criticized for being misogynistic, even though it is much less so than his other films, on top of being much, much less misandristic than most romantic comedies.”

The LA junket is allegedly happening later this month.

A Houston-based critic informs that Universal’s field office is having four screenings of Bridesmaids in that city between 4.20 and 5.10, and critics, according to one source, have been invited to these so you’ve basically got Houston critics being given a looksee before NY and LA critics…or so it appears.

What a pleasure to hear President Obama talk about blunt realpolitik conversations with reps of John Boehner and Paul Ryan without the usual measured, turn-the-other-cheek tonality that he always puts out during press conferences and official announcements. Eat it, suckah!

During last year’s Cannes Film Festival I brilliantly managed to avoid seeing the winner of the Semaine de Critiques Grand Prix prize winner — Janus Metz‘s Armadillo, a Danish-produced Afghanistan war doc which Kino Lorber is opening today in New York. The trailer suggests something riveting and impressionistic , and the doc’s Rotten Tomatoes rating (88%) is tied for the highest of any film opening today.

The other 4.15 opener with an 88% rating is Janet Grillo‘s Fly Away.

I’m expecting an Armadillo screener to arrive tomorrow. I asked the Kino Lorber rep when Metz’s film might open in Los Angeles and other cities, but that’s apparently still being determined.

I half-admired and half-hated Sebastian Junger and Tim Hetherington‘s Restrepo, the last significant Afghanistan-war doc. Here’s my 6.20.10 slam piece in which I explained how Restrepo advances its pro-troops, pro-war-effort agenda by lying through omission. Here’s hoping that Armadillo provides a counter-balance.

With its 1.33 cropping and squawky Japanese-transistor-radio sound, this YouTube clip of the main-title sequence from Clive Donner‘s What’s New, Pussycat? feels a bit underwhelming. But it’s still one of the liveliest, bounciest and most vigorously designed main-title sequences ever thrown together for a ’60s film.

More to the point, for an anarchic, occasionally amusing but not-especially-good ’60s comedy. Because that’s the category we’re dealing with here — great opening credits followed by a letdown movie.

The only other two examples I can think of are the ’60s montage “The Times They Are A’Changin'” credits for Watchmen and Saul Bass’s legendary black-cat credit sequence for Walk on The Wild Side.

The 2006 Koch Lorber DVD of Lina Wertmuller‘s Seven Beauties looks fine, but this 1975 Italian-made classic should be upgraded to Bluray. I was ripped the first time I saw it, and I remember laughing helplessly during the opening credits…oh, yeah.

Bertrand Tavernier‘s The Princess of Montpensier (IFC Films) opens today in theatres and 4.20 on demand. Here’s my 3.9 review: “The initial response at the 2010 Cannes Film Festival was not wildly enthusiastic, so I was rather surprised to find that this historical drama of intimacy, set in 16th Century France during the Catholic vs. Huguenot wars, is one of the most intriguing erotic trips I’ve taken in a long while.

“Partly because the occasionally undressed lead, Melanie Thierry, performs in a way that feels rather prim and Grace Kelly-ish, an all-but-extinct vibe or romantic brand in films today. But mostly because the movie is mostly about unrequited desire and hardly at all about consummation. It’s probably not bawdy or obvious enough for most viewers, but I felt and believed this film without the slightest discomfort, and I never wanted to turn it off or multitask as I watched.

“The story is basically about four or five guys who can think of little else but having Thierry, and who spend most of their screen time being told ‘if only,’ ‘no,’ ‘not now,’ ‘not here’ and so on. I only know that the combination of Thierry, the feeling of sensual restraint or suppression, and the generally realistic and non-movieish atmosphere created by Tavernier and his team (including some excellent hand-to-hand combat and duelling scenes) feels right and believable and on-the-money.

“It’s delightful when a film drops you into an exotic time-trip visitation without making this world seem arch or ‘performed’ or overly prettified or set-decorated within an inch of its life. I’ve never thought of Tavernier as a director who excels or even cares about violent action and/or mercury-popping eroticism, but maybe I need to go back to watch some of his films.

“I didn’t expect to say this, but I felt as stirred and satisfied and convinced by The Princess of Montpensier as I was by Andrzej Wajda‘s Danton (’83), a superb historical drama about the post-revolutionary “terror.”