Month: June 2011

This morning a publicist working for Nicholas Winding Refn‘s Drive was wondering why I was so keen to see it at the LA Film Festival this weekend, since I’d already seen it in Cannes. That’s true, I said, but with only half of my hearing. My right ear was totally clogged during my Thursday evening screening (5.19) in the Grand Palais, I explained, and I’d love to see it again now that both ears are back in operation.

Nice things that put you in a great mood are rarely interesting. It’s always more fun to write about anger or irritation and opposition of some kind. But losing almost all of the hearing in my right ear made me feel weak and vulnerable in the most awful way, and getting it back two and half days later made me feel ecstatic, renewed…saved. There’s nothing like having one of your senses severely impaired to make you really appreciate, etc.

Bath water had seeped into my right ear canal on the morning on Thursday, May 19th, my last full day at the Cannes Film Festival, and I couldn’t get it out to save my life. I tilted my head back and forth and slapped the side of my head repeatedly. I jumped up and down like a pogo stick. I started applying some ear drops and an ear-cleaning solution that I’d bought at a pharmacy. Nothing worked. And no one had sharply yanked my ear (the cause of Thomas Alva Edison‘s hearing problem) or hit me on the side of the head (which is what Brian Wilson‘s father had done, causing his singer-songwriter son to go deaf in one ear) and I hadn’t allowed it to get infected or anything. It was just bath water! But after a while I began to wonder if it was something else.

My left ear was okay but I couldn’t hear a damn thing on the other side. All I could hear was a droning inner-ear noise that sounded like distant crickets or locusts on a hot summer night. My Drive viewing was probably affected in some vaguely negative way by this, although I didn’t let on in my review. I was feeling a bit freaked but I told no one.

My right ear was still clogged late Thursday night and all day Friday. I arrived in Paris around 10:30 or 11 am on 5.20 and lived with it all day and that night. The ear drops, etc. Everything that was said to me I had to lean forward and say, “Come again?” Saturday morning, same thing. And then around noon I was driving my rented scooter down a cobblestoned hill in Montmartre, and….whusshhhhhh. My ear opened up. I could suddenly feel air seeping in, and I was hearing in glorious stereo again. It was like escaping from prison but without any guards or cops chasing me. I was free. All the intense worry about possibly having to deal with some kind of ongoing hearing issue disappeared. Wow! It was the most the purely happy moment I’ve known in a long, long time.

Honestly? I think this new Screen Gems one-sheet is just as creepily effective in its own way as the original Sam Peckinpah-Dustin Hoffman version. Okay, they could have done without the slogan. The art very clearly conveys what the basic conflict is.

L.A. Times blogger columnist Randy Lewis (Pop & Hiss) is reporting that Martin Scorsese‘s George Harrison: Living in the Material World, a documentary about the deceased former Beatle, will be out later this year. Lewis recently got the skinny from Olivia Harrison, widow of the late George Harrison, in Las Vegas,

And that’s all — no extra questions, no digging, no curiosity, no nothing.

“I just came from New York and Monday I’m going to see [the film] again,” Olivia tells Lewis. “We’re real excited about it…Marty is such a great storyteller, and of course he always finds the story that you don’t expect.”

And what unexpected story might that be? Lewis doesn’t ask. What other Scorsese music documentary does the Harrison film most resemble, if any? Lewis doesn’t ask. Are there any heretofore unheard Harrison musical compositions in the film? Lewis doesn’t ask. Does Scorsese use some relatively obscure, in-depth filmed interview that Harrison once gave as a through-line, or does he use a hundred different interview clips? Lewis doesn’t ask. Does the Harrison film thoroughly burrow into G.H.’s childhood and early musical influences like No Direction Home took its time with Bob Dylan‘s early history and influences? Lewis doesn’t ask. Is the Harrison doc 2 1/2 hours or 3 hours or 208 minutes long, or is it a relatively tight and concise 90 minutes or two hours? Lewis doesn’t ask.

After having written what some considered to be a tone-deaf, doesn’t-wanna-get-it pan of X-Men: First Class, L.A. Weekly critic Karina Longworth has now slapped down Martin Campbell‘s The Green Lantern (Warner Bros., 6.17). Not that Longworth isn’t “right” — the across-the-board word is that this $300 million dollar film stinks — but she’s now presumed to be semi-unreceptive to this kind of film going in.

The Green Lantern “never bothers to suggest that [character and plot elements] really matter,” she laments. “Campbell’s ADD style privileges spectacle over story — so much so that the film never rewards the viewer for even trying to keep track of what is going on.

“So you give up, and instead try to grab on to the small pleasures, which momentarily distract from the fact that the narrative is nonsensical, the characters so boilerplate that their every action seem preordained from the earliest frames, even as the action on-screen is often incoherent.”

I love this passage: “While Ryan Reynolds isn’t a sharp enough actor to really find the crackle in his standard-issue superhero wisecracks, his body is a marvel of precision sculpting. As he breathes in and out in the skin-tight, digitally enhanced Lantern suit, each abdominal muscle seems to pulse independently. It’s transfixing — and the closest Green Lantern gets to character detail.”

It suddenly hit me yesterday when I picked up my LA FilmFest press pass and newsprint schedule (which uses what looks like five-point typeface) that there are 15 if not 20 films and events that I’d like to catch over this 11-day film festival. Of which I might actually catch 10 or 12. The mitigating factor, of course, is that every one of them requires a 35- to 40-minute trek from West Hollywood to downtown, and then having to find parking, etc. I’m putting my red bicycle on my car’s rear bike rack…cooler that way.

As usual, I like the festival’s iPhone app a lot more than their website.

In no particular order I need to see/attend the following:

(a) Richard Linklater‘s Bernie with Jack Black and Shirley Maclaine (opening night attraction on Thursday, 6.16);

(b) Jack Black and Shirley MacLaine in conversation on 6.23 at 8pm;

(c) Troy Nixey and Guillermo del Toro‘s Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark with Guy Pearce and Katie Holmes (Sunday, 6.26);

(d) Julie Taymor in conversation on Sunday, 618 at Grammy Museum (i.e., machine-gun questions about her B’way Spider-Man debacle);

(e) a re-viewing of Nicholas Winding Refn‘s Drive (which I first saw in Cannes) on Friday, 6.17;

(f) Attack the Block on Wednesday, 6.22;

(g) Vera Farmiga‘s Higher Ground on either Saturday, 6.25 or Sunday, 6.26;

(h) Miranda July’s The Future (which I missed at Sundance 2011) on 56.24 or 6.25;

(i) Terri, a fat-kid movie with John C. Reilly that I really don’t want to see, on 6.25 or 6.26;

(j) a re-viewing of Paddy Considine‘s Tyrannosaur, which I saw and flat-out worshipped at Sundance 2011;

(k) Guy Maddin‘s The Seduction of Ingmar Bergman on Saturday, 6.28 at John Anson Ford Amphitheatre;

(l) Unravelled on 6.17, 6.18 or 6.20;

(m) The Bad Intentions;

(n) How To Cheat:

(o) You Hurt My Feelings;

(p) Elite Squad: The Enemy Within; and

(q) An Evening with James Franco (if I can get a ticket, I mean).

The Hello! story summary that accompanies this photo of Mildred Beana and her 13 year-old son Joseph feels a wee bit fake and gussied up. I’m not sure that copy is required to begin with anyway.

“Once upon a time in Louisiana, waaaaay back in early October 2009 when we were all 20 months younger and our hearts were lighter and Barack Obama was about nine months into the first year of his administration, I visited the Shreveport set of Rod Lurie‘s Straw Dogs…”

Red River (yes, the same one that John Wayne and Montgomery Clift crossed) adjacent to the Sumner house used for Rod Lurie’s Straw Dogs.

I’m sorry but it’s very hard for me to write up a set-visit story that happened this long ago. I tried to do it about an hour ago and I gave up soon after. The spigots won’t turn on.

I was told not to file anything story-wise during my Shreveport visit, although I posted a photo piece on 10.2. Two or three weeks ago I was told I could finally post. Straw Dogs is set to open in September 2011 and early-bird press screenings will be happening this summer so it’s time to start building awareness, etc. But I can’t find a way back into it. The experience aroma has to be fresh in my nostrils, or it has to be many years old.

It’s odd, I think, that Variety‘s Justin Kroll (or his editor) would use quote marks to highlight the name of the rock group that Mick Jagger has been playing with for the last 49 years. It just seems weird that a writer or editor for the oldest showbiz trade in existence would do that. Editor: “Hey, Justin, a rock group’s name is like a play or a book title or a title of a movie…right?” Kroll: “Yeah, I guess so. It’s a performing act and you have to pay to see them….same difference.”

Quotes are a way of implying distance or a certain skeptical attitude on the part of a writer or a publication. You know…like a 1957 Time magazine story about beatniks using terms like “reefer” and “way out” in quotes? Variety referring to “The Rolling Stones” feels a bit analagous to that joke that Robert Klein told in the ’80s about the N.Y. Times always referring to male story subjects as “Mr.”, and concluding that in a story about Meat Loaf they would refer to him as “Mr. Loaf.”

You’re good for most LA Film Fest screenings and events if you have a yellow press badge, but you have to specially RSVP for certain special screenings and events. One of them is “An Evening With James Franco” on Monday, 6.20. So I RSVPed to it this morning, and soon after received this reply: “Jeffrey — We have limited tickets to this event so we’ll note your request and let you know of the status closer to the event.”

So I wrote back and said, “Can I be honest? I don’t care that much about attending this thing anyway.” In response to this the FIND publicist wrote back and said, “Jeffrey — in response to your last email, would you like me to remove you from the list?” And I replied, “No — I didn’t ask you to remove me from your list. Would you yourself like to do that? Because…what, I’m not enthusiastic about attending the Franco thing?

“Sorry but I just have no interest in attending chit-chat events that I’ve RSVPed to and then having received a response that says ‘well, we might not be able to fit you in but hang in there…maybe….we’ll see.’ Life is too short to wait on pins and needles to see if I’ll be allowed to listen to the great James Franco talk about stuff…please.”

You just get busy and pushing yourself with all these events stacked up and it all kind of gets scrambled around and…I don’t know why I posted this but on some vague level it has something to do with Franco’s post-Oscar-telecast rep and the expectation levels for Rise of the Planet of the Apes (20th Century Fox, 8.5).

Three days of coverage about Tennesse’s Bonnaroo Music Festival (or whatever it’s precisely called) from Whoa magazine‘s Jett Wells — Day One, Day Two and Day Three. Driving his mom’s car, Jett and Emily left Sunday morning from Manchester, Tennessee; they arrived back in Brooklyn at 3:15 am this morning.