God, the green is such a relief after staring at that horrible orange Haywire poster for the last three hours! It’s like a nice misty rainshower on my eyeballs. Why don’t they just say “September” instead of “Fall”? Bennett Miller‘s biz-minded baseball drama opens on 9.23. Why be opaque about it?
I love the smell of moist earth and grass when I sit along (or close to) the first or third-base line in a major-league stadium.
I’ve explained two or three times that orange is a bad color to use in ads, movie posters and/or DVD/Bluray covers. I mentioned this in a recent riff about a British Touch of Evil Bluray. And I wrote last August that “any emphatic use of orange feels a bit oppressive” because “it’s a safety color when you’re hunting or working construction or standing on a busy traffic road in the evening, but it’s also a control color — a symbol used to enforce rules and segregate prisoners and make people stay within boundaries.”
Orange doesn’t say “life can occasionally be beautiful or transporting.” It says “do this,” “watch out,” “don’t go there,” “slow down,” etc.
I for one am tremulous with concern about what Baz Luhrman is going to do with (and to) F. Scott Fitzgerald‘s The Great Gatsby when he begins shooting it in 3D later this year. Carey Mulligan is too diplomatic to voice fears along these lines, but she surely knows that Baz would sooner slit his throat than simply “film the book”.
My guess is that Luhrman’s conjuring of 1920s Long Island will be as authentic as his recreation of “belle epoque” Paris in Moulin Rouge, or maybe Zack Snyder‘s ancient Greece in 300.
The upside is that no matter how eccentric Luhrman’s version turns out to be, it’ll have more of a pulse than Jack Clayton’s 1974 version, widely regarded as one of the stiffest adaptations in Hollywood history. The downside is that Baz has been indulging his exuberant instincts more and more as he grows older. The Baz who made Strictly Ballroom or Romeo + Juliet, even, has pretty much disappeared.
The lineup, once more, will be Mulligan as Daisy Buchanan, Leonardo DiCaprio as Jay Gatsby, Tobey Maguire as Nick Carraway; Joel Edgerton as Tom Buchanan, Isla Fisher as Myrtle Wilson; and Elizabeth Debicki as Jordan Baker.
Yesterday evening N.Y. Times reporter Michael Cieply wrote about catching up with Werner Herzog, of all people, at ComicCon. The legendary 68 year-old filmmaker “was absorbing the Breughel-like atmospherics” while taking a break from a death-row documentary that he’s making with Erik Nelson.
For my money, CNN’s Dr. Drew Pinsky has delivered the likeliest explanation of why Amy Winehouse is dead. “Opiate addiction takes months to years of treatment,” he explained yesterday. “And one of the most serous risks in my experience of that recovery for celebrities and particularly musicians is that they return to their career, they return to the road far too prematurely, and it’s absolutely predictable what will happen.
“People look at these stories and go, ‘Oh, addiction treatment doesn’t work.’ The crazy thing about addiction is that part of the disease is a disturbance of thinking [in which] addict tell themselves they don’t need to listen to what they’re being told to do.
“But just as with the diabetic, if they don’t take their insulin [and] the addict doesn’t do their recovery program, they inevitably in all cases will relapse, and if it’s opiate addiction, it’s a progrssion to fatality. The prognosis for an opiate addict is worse than the vast majority of cancers.”
The Observer‘s Tim Adams has written an excellent piece about comment-thread big-mouths that partially focuses on LexG. The article also looks at the anonymity factor, which I feel is vital for good frank chatter. Yes, HE’s very own LexG is shaking the rafters in England. (Adams twice asked for his email address, which I passed along. As there are no LexG quotes in the piece, it’s possible that he blew Adams off…just like he couldn’t be reached for a recent Oscar Poker podcast.)
“Some trolls have become nearly as famous as the blogs to which they attach themselves, in a curious, parasitical kind of relationship,” Adams writes.
“Jeffrey Wells, author of Hollywood Elsewhere, is a former LA Times Syndicate columnist who has been blogging inside stories about movies for 15 years. For the last couple of years his gossip and commentary has been dogged by the invective of a character called LexG, whose 200-odd self-loathing and wildly negative posts recently moved Wells to address him directly:
“‘The coarseness, the self-pity and the occasional eye-pokes and cruel dismissiveness have to be turned down. Way down. Arguments and genuine disdain for certain debaters can be entertaining, mind. I’m not trying to be Ms. Manners. But there finally has to be an emphasis on perception and love and passion and the glories of good writing. There has to be an emphasis on letting in the light rather than damning the darkness of the trolls and vomiting on the floor and kicking this or that Hollywood Elsewhere contributor in the balls…’
“When I spoke to Wells about LexG, he was philosophical. ‘Everybody on the site writes anonymously, except me,’ he says. ‘If they didn’t I think it would cause them to dry up. This place is like a bubble in which you can explode, let the inner lava out. And, boy, is there a lot of lava.’
“He has resisted insisting that people write under their own name because that would kill the comments instantly. ‘Why would you take that one in 100 chance that your mother or a future employer will read what you were thinking late one night a dozen years ago if you didn’t have to?’ For haters, Wells believes, anonymity makes for livelier writing. ‘It’s a trick, really — the less you feel you will be identified, the more uninhibited you can be.
“At his best LexG really knows how to write well and hold a thought and keep it going. He is relatively sane but certainly not a happy guy. He’s been doing this a couple of years now and he really has become a presence; he does it on all the Hollywood sites.’
“Have they ever met?
“‘Just once,’ Wells says. ‘I asked him to write a column of his own, give him a corner of the site, bring him out in the open.’ LexG didn’t want to do it; he seemed horrified at the prospect. ‘He just wanted to comment on my stuff,’ Wells suggests. ‘He’s a counter-puncher, I guess. The rules on my site remain simple, though. No ugly rancid personal comments directed against me. And no Tea Party bullshit.”
“The big problem [Wells] finds running the blog is that his anonymous commenters get a kind of pack mentality. And the comments quickly become a one-note invective.
“As a writer Wells feels he needs a range of emotion: ‘I also do personal confession or I can be really enthusiastic about something. But the comments tend to be one color, and that becomes drab. It’s tougher, I guess, to be enthusiastic, to really set out honestly why something means something to you. It takes maybe twice as long. I can run with disdain and nastiness for a while but you don’t want to always be the guy banging a shoe on the table. Like LexG. I mean it’s not healthy, for a start…'”
Supplemental Thoughts: (1) I’m not the only person on HE to use my own name — many journalists who comment (including Glenn Kenny, Joe Leydon and Lewis Beale) use their names so I shouldn’t have spoken so quickly. (2) LexG has positive currents in him, and genuine enthusiasm for this and that from time to time, so I didn’t mean to characterize him solely as “banging a shoe on the table” kind of guy.
Both Variety‘s Peter Debruge and The Hollywood Reporter‘s Kirk Honeycutt seem to agree that Jon Favreau‘s Cowboys & Aliens (Universal, 7.29), which screened last night at ComicCon, has wisely emphasized classic-old-west aspects and solid character-driven writing over flash-in-the-pan alien FX, and is therefore no Wild Wild West.
This doesn’t entirely square with a view by TheWrap‘s Tim Kenneally that Cowboys & Aliens is “an action flick from head to tentacle” — a “Gunfight at the O.K. Corral meets Independence Day” that “will not be lauded for its emotional complexity” and is “not entirely out of this world.”
Deadline‘s Luke Y. Thompson didn’t run a review, but he’s reported that it’s a spottily flawed, somewhat superficial film, but that the fans loved it, particularly the violent scenes, and double-particularly those between Harrison Ford and Daniel Craig.
Debruge calls it “a ripping good ride” and “a full-bodied, roundly satisfying yarn, positioning [the film] to join the half-dozen Westerns to crack the $100 million club.”
Honeycutt calls Cowboys & Aliens “a solid success. For a tent-pole, Comic-Con movie, this one devotes a gratifying amount of time to character and achieves most of its success because Favreau has intelligently cast his film and let his actors do their thing…as good as the visual effects are, you walk away from the movie with a memory of actors’ faces, lines of dialogue and actions that speak more to character than to shock-and-awe.”
HE’s Michael Merlob couldn’t get into the screening, but says he’s “heard mostly good things. Some folks are saying it has plot holes but is well-executed overall. Reactions seem generally positive.”
Yesterday evening I briefly visited an open-air MOCA reception at West Hollywood’s Pacific Design Center for Miranda July, director of The Future (Razor/Match, 7.29). and particularly her outdoor sculpture exhibit, “Eleven Heavy Things.” (Now through 10.23.) That’s July posing within one of her front-lawn sculptures with that grinning middle-aged guy with the glasses.
I spoke to Beginners director Mike Mills, July’s husband, whom I’d met at a recent Santa Barbara reception, but not to July, whose upcoming film I still haven’t seen, in part due to my own instinctual, possibly unjustified fear of what The Future may bring, and partly due to a recent lack of screening invites from Marina Bailey.
For me, the unnaturally sculpted hill-and-dale lawn in front of the PDC is one of the most serene atmospheres you can find in Los Angeles. July’s six or seven “Heavy” sculptures ahave been placed — embedded — on this lawn. The grass smells wonderful.
