Day: July 28, 2011

I’m guessing that Crazy, Stupid, Love and Cowboys & Aliens will sell the most tickets this weekend, but the two best openers — easily, hands down — are from County Galway, Ireland and the Morden neighborhood in southern London. I’m speaking of John Michael McDonagh‘s The Guard, which I’ve praised two or three times in recent weeks, and Joe Cornish‘s Attack The Block (Screen Gems), which I finally saw this evening.

Attack The Block obviously cost a small fraction of the $100 million that Cowboys & Aliens spent on itself, and yes, the furry ape-aliens with green phosphorescent teeth are flagrantly unbelievable if not borderline comical. But they’re still scarier and snarlier and a lot more fun to to shoot and stab and run away from than the dipshit hard-drive aliens in Cowboys & Aliens, which are direct descendants of the Alien and Super 8 monsters, and boring for that.

The point is that Attack The Block is a smarter, more character-flavored, more tightly constructed entertainment than Cowboys, and I don’t mean solely in terms of tension and thrills. Block is also about something — i.e., community values and urban-jungle teens learning to take responsibility and fly straight and become men — while Cowboys is…what? About kissing the behinds of ComicCon fanboys and their low, sloppy taste in comic-book movies? About wanting to make money?

Cornish seems to be emphasizing the metaphor with his use of cartoony growling furries. He’s almost saying “forget the realism factor…these monsters are obviously bullshit and you and I know it, so let’s forget about our technical efforts and concentrate on what the threat of these monsters mean to the characters.” None of us believe in movie monsters. Not really. But there’s something curiously liberating about beasts that are excessively unbelievable. After watching Attack The Block this evening I was telling myself I don’t want to see another super-expensive CG monster ever again.

I’ll lengthen this review when I wake up tomorrow. I’m whipped.

It’s fairly common knowledge that the key movers and shakers in turning Wes Anderson and Owen Wilson‘s Bottle Rocket (’96) into a “go” feature were the late Polly Platt, producer-screenwriter L.M. Kit Carson and concert promoter and Woodstock ’69 maestro Michael Lang. In the wake of Platt’s death, I thought I’d re-tell the story one more time for the record. I discussed it with Carson today, and heard from Anderson online. Lang didn’t get back.

(l. to r.) The late Polly Platt, Wes Anderson, L.M. Kit Carson, Michael Lang.

Bottle Rocket was green-lighted because Carson slipped the 13-minute black-and-white Bottle Rocket short — directed by Anderson, co-written by Wes and Owen and exec produced by Carson and Lang — to Platt in early ’94. The short had just played at Sundance, and Platt was involved in cutting the doomed musical I’ll Do Anything with director James L. Brooks.

Carson had seen a few minutes of rough footage that Anderson had shot, and convinced Lang to invest $7500 to pay for the short’s production costs.

“Polly was the person who persuaded Jim Brooks to watch the Bottle Rocket short during lunch break,” says Carson. “They were in the editing room on I’ll Do Anything, and she stuck the tape into a VHS player and and made him watch it. When it ended Brooks looked up and said, ‘What’s anybody waiting for? Make a deal. This is a go picture.’ No-shit-thanks, Polly Platt, for this movie.”

Here’s part 1 and part 2 of the original Bottle Rocket short.

“Wes and Owen had showed me some rough footage,” Carson recalls. ” It wasn’t even a cut-together film. I got Michael Lang to write a check for $7500, and we took that and re-shot the short.” Current Sundance honcho John Cooper was a programmer at the time, and he told Carson’s partner Cynthia Hargrave that the short “‘has to be 13 minutes and no longer” so that’s the length they cut it to.

After the Sundance showing Carson sent the tape to Platt at the recommendation of producer Barbara Boyle, who’s now a senior professor/chair/something-or-other with UCLA’s film program.

Bottle Rocket being greenlighted by Brooks and Columbia “was a major moment….a comet coming out of the universe and hitting Wes Anderson on his left shoulder,” says Carson. And yet despite this history relations cooled between Anderson and Carson during shooting, and pretty much ceased after the film was released. Vague vibes, no reciprocity or keeping in touch over future projects.

“My favorite moment with Wes — relatively recently, I mean — was around the time of the release of The Darjeeling Limited,” Carson relates. “I was on the phone with Roman Coppola, and he said, ‘Someone wants to talk to you.’ And Wes got on the line and said, ‘Roman says I should say thank you.'”

I wrote Anderson about this anecdote and he wrote back as follows: “I don’t recall the conversation Kit refers to but I was very happy to see him in LA during that time and [I] still miss him.” Anderson, currently shooting Moonrise Kingdom in New England, said he’d rather not be quoted about Platt’s passing. “Some people have been asking me for comments but really don’t wish to share anything for now,” he said.

I fell asleep for some reason. (Because of three hours sleep last night?) Then I woke up and realized I’d forgotten to post this.

This could be semi-passable. Or good, even. My insect antennae are sensing Eddie Murphy‘s funniest performance since Bowfinger, or at least the potential of that. Maybe. It’s also nice to see that Gabby Sidibe has scored a post-Precious gig.

Dan McCarthy‘s abstract, sepia-toned one-sheet for Paddy Considine‘s Tyrannosaur (Strand Releasing, November) tells you it’s some kind of austere art film. It’s obviously striking but it conveys nothing of the tone of compassion and forgiveness that slips into the narrative during Act 2 and especially Act 3. The suggestion is mainly that someone or something ferocious will bite someone’s head off. And that’s only about a quarter…okay, a third of the whole pie.

Meanwhile Strand continues to not post a YouTube trailer, despite assurances passed along to this columnist on 6.15 (or about five weeks ago) that a trailer was “being finalized.” The film opens in the UK and Ireland in mid-October. Ten or eleven weeks from the UK opening and there’s no trailer? Who opens a film this way?

Intuitive currents made it clear a long time ago that I’ll probably be getting my hate-on for Gary Ross‘s The Hunger Games (Lionsgate, 3.23). This will obviously change if it’s any good, but somehow and some way I just “know” this film is trouble. A primitive, walloping Rollerball-meets-Girlfight youth-market flick — that’s what I’m seeing in my thought dreams. Ross (Pleasantville, Seabiscuit) could make it come out right…maybe. But any movie based on a book classified as “young adult science fiction” — that in itself is a stopper.

I also suspect that any movie that gets an early Entertainment Weekly cover is probably indicative of something that’ll be pandering to the not-so-bright. Plus I have issues with any book author named “Suzanne.” Yes, I know — I have to read the damn book and shut up until I do.

The Ides of March is an adaptation of Farragut North, a good play about political operatives that I saw performed a couple of years ago at the Geffen with Chris Pine and Chris Noth. Ryan Gosling and Phillip Seymour Hoffman play these parts, respectively, in the film. George Clooney‘s presidential candidate was created for the film.

Are there any official 2011 Venice Film Festival titles that weren’t covered in Nick Vivarelli’s 7.25 Variety piece? Just asking. The Ides Of March, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Wuthering Heights, Texas Killing Fields, A Dangerous Method, Abel Ferrara’s 4:44 Last Day On Earth, Killer Joe, The Exchange, Shame, Carnage, Dark Horse, etc.

AICN’s Capone and a few other goonies recently met with Harrison Ford in Montana to discuss Cowboys & Aliens, and the following exchange was part of it:

Q: “There’s a lot of talk about nostalgia and bringing a sense of nostalgia to movies currently for an audience. Jon [Favreau] mentioned earlier that they had envisioned a scene where Daniel Craig‘s character jumps on one of the alien spacecrafts as sort of a similar moment to that Vick Armstrong stunt in [an Indiana Jones film] where he jumps on the tank. I was wondering if there is also a sense of nostalgia for action adventure that drew you to this film as well?

Ford: “Nope.”

[Everyone Laughs]

Q: “Fair enough.”

Ford: “I’m in it for the money. This is my job. I love making movies and I love being a part of good movies and I love working with ambitious people. Nostalgia doesn’t enter into it for me.”

Shutting down a fanboy question and pissing on nostalgia with a one-word answer…quite excellent! But in another sense everyone says that Ford’s insistence on having his quote met before he opens a script is one significant thing that’s not working in Ford’s favor at this stage of the game. He has to adopt a standard two-tier approach — i.e., getting his quote for the big-budget projects but doing smaller films for a reduced fee because he wants to do them and life is short.