Month: July 2011

Manhattan-based HE reader Chris attended last night’s GenArts screening of 30 Minutes or Less (Sony, 8.12) and came away mildly pleased, calling it a “fun comedy worth checking out.” But costar Danny McBride, he says, “proves once again that less is more with him…he has some funny moments, but also had many parts that fell flat and were met with near-silence.”

Pic is “loosely based on an unusual bank robbery which occurred on August 28, 2003 in Erie, Pennsylvania,” says the Wiki page, “in which pizza delivery man Brian Wells was killed when a bomb fastened to his neck detonated once he was apprehended by police.”

Synopsis: “After hiring an assassin to murder his father for his insurance money, the antagonist, Dwayne (Danny McBride), and partner in crime Travis (Nick Swardson), kidnap a pizza delivery guy named Nick (Jesse Eisenberg) and force him to rob a bank while wearing a bomb vest attached to a 10-hour timer.”

Chris says “the entire premise is absurd, of course…it’s a little strange how Eisenberg’s character is chosen to pull of the heist. But if you don’t get too caught up in these things and can accept the basic premise, there’s a good time to be had.

“Eisenberg and Aziz Ansari are the highlights, and their interplay as best friends with some baggage is a lot of fun. Not exactly groundbreaking stuff, but these guys make it work.

“I didn’t fully buy into the inherent danger of what was happening at all times, but then again I’m not sure I was supposed to. I didn’t see Zombieland, but enjoyed this enough to check it out, which qualifies as a recommendation in my book.”

I asked “what are the big knockout scenes that really work?”, etc.

“The bank robbery scene and the leadup to tjhat were my favorite scenes, with a few legitimately hilarious beats,” he said. “The whole thing is a credit to Eisenberg and Ansari playing two guys who are gaining an excessive amount of confidence as they go along, yet are still clearly amateurs at this whole crime thing. Their interplay throughout made the movie for me, and its the best thing about it by far.

“Another highlight is Michael Pena as the hitman hired to kill McBride’s father. There’s also a little love story involving Eisenberg and Ansari’s twin sister, that doesn’t hurt the movie, but isn’t important other to bring conflict between the two friends.

“Again, the thing that drags the movie down is McBride. I really enjoy Eastbound and Down, but that character is perfect for that show. Trying to apply that archetype character to so many other vehicles is a huge mistake. In the end the character he plays in this is just a pathetic loser, not exactly what you want from one of your main characters even if he’s supposed to be inept.

“When 30 Minutes or Less is ‘on’ it’s really firing on all cylinders. It just can’t keep that going consistently the whole way through. It’s a movie that tops out at ‘decent’ and holds that level.”

Due respect but I feel it’s a mistake to repeat the same clips in a trailer, even if the idea is to (a) show, (b) reverse-shift and then (c) return and repeat. The same clips of Kate Bosworth are shown twice in the recently posted official trailer for Rod Lurie‘s Straw Dogs. I’m especially bothered by one at the 28 second and 1:58 mark in which Bosworth talks about “men with guns,” etc. I don’t mean to rag but it doesn’t work.

Captured at 28-second mark of new Straw Dogs trailer.

Screen grab from trailer at 1 minute, 58-second mark.

Could the World War 2 dogfight sequences in this trailer for George Lucas‘s Red Tail (1.20.12) look any more fake? What a non-pleasure it’ll be to wallow in visual values and terms that have nothing to do with 1940s verisimilitude and everything to do with Lucas wanting to slick this thing up as much as possible.

Cuba Gooding Jr. and Terrence Howard are the costars.

Lucas has been struggling with this sucker since filming began in March 2009 and reshoots happened in March 2010. Obviously it’s a troubled and ungenuine enterprise. Failure of this sort couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy. The director of record is Anthony Hemingway.

From the Wiki page: “Production began in March 2009. Principal photography took place in the Czech Republic, Italy, Croatia and England. Lucas took over direction of reshoots, in March 2010 as Hemingway was busy working on episodes of the HBO series Treme. Hemingway will have final approval over the footage.”

Yes, guys who stare or noticably glance at women’s breasts in social or business situations are being gauche. It’s tedious and tiresome so who wouldn’t agree with the point of this video? Nobody. But it’s not funny. Not clever enough. Just lies there.

Surely women are okay with quick darting glances from time to time. That’s only normal, right? Or is glancing of any kind considered gauche? I’ve noticed women admiring my broad shoulders from time to time and I say to myself “sure, fine.” Doesn’t bother me.

Over the last few months we’ve seen or learned of four thoughtful dramas with the word “Better” or “Life” in the title, and two with the exact same title. Chris Weitz‘s A Better Life, a drama about a Mexican immigrant’s struggle to survive misfortune, has been playing since late June. And Cedric Kahn‘s A Better Life, a French-produced drama about economic hardship, will play at the 2011 Toronto Film Festival.

Also playing at Toronto will be Ann Hui‘s A Simple Life, which also deals with cultural and economic hardships and adjustments. And then there was Susanne Bier‘s In A Better World, which opened in early April after winning the Best Foreign Language Feature Oscar last February.

I just think it’s time to give the Better + Life combos a rest.

So the New York Film Festival‘s crack team (Scott Foundas, Rose Kuo, Todd McCarthy, etc.) has landed Roman Polanski‘s Carnage for their opening-night attraction. Meaning there will be no Carnage at the Toronto Film Festival due to NYFF exclusivity terms, although it’ll have its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival in early September.

Carnage costars Cristoph Waltz, Kate Winslet, John C. Reilly and Jodie Foster with director Roman Polanski.

I’m going to need to catch the NYFF press screening of Carnage post-Toronto, which will be sometime between 9.18 and 9.25…right? Or do I have wait until 9.27 or 9.28? I’d like to know.

My other question (which NYFF and Focus Features staffers have so far declined to answer) is whether or not Tomas Alfredson‘s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, which will also preem at Venice, will be confirmed as a Toronto Film Festival attraction or as another NYFF booking down the road? It doesn’t figure that Venice has TTSS booked but not Toronto unless the NYFF has locked it down. Well…?

“All strong directors are sons of bitches,” John Ford allegedly said to screenwriter Nunnally Johnson sometime in the late ’40s or early ’50s. His point was that Johnson, in Ford’s view, was too much of a nice, thoughtful, fair-minded guy to cut it as a director. Directors basically can’t be mellow or gentle or accommodating. They need to be tough, pugnacious and manipulative mo’fos in order to get what they want. And if they’re too deferential, they won’t last.

(l.) Wes Anderson; (r.) John Ford.

I was reminded yesterday what a tough mo’fo Wes Anderson is when I asked him via email if he had a comment about Polly Platt‘s death, and he said “I don’t wish to share anything at this time.” What he actually meant, I suspect, is that he was temporarily refusing to disengage from the ultra-intense concentration he’s devoting to the making of Moonrise Kingdom, and that he just can’t and won’t disengage to compose a short paragraph about the woman who all-but-singlehandedly brought him into Hollywood’s top-tier realm.

That’s not conventional selfishness or thoughtlessness, but hard-core battlefield thinking. All movies are wars — enemies all around, one skirmish after another, betrayal lurking, bullets whizzing — and Wes was basically saying, “Polly and I know what our relationship was about and what she did for me, and I just don’t feel the need to jump through your quote hoop at this exact moment. I’ll say something about Polly at a time of my own choosing. But that was then and right now I’m leading the Third Army across France and into Germany so if you’ll excuse me…”

This reminded me of another “don’t mess with Wes” moment when I obtained entry into the Royal Tenenbaums Manhattan after-party in September 2001, and an enraged Wes came over and laid into me something fierce for (a) being at the party when he didn’t want me there because (b) I’d written a half-and-half review of Tenenbaums that leaned negative, and which came out a day or two earlier than other N.Y. Film Festival reviews. We talked the next morning in a calmer way, but I’d learned what a scrappy, in-your-face guy he could be when angry or under pressure. No pushover.

All good directors (Mann, Stone, Tarantino, Cameron, Kurosawa, Nichols, Kubrick) are know to have operated like this in their prime. They don’t sashay their way through the making of a film — they stress and scheme and argue and finagle to get whatever they want any way they can. Making a movie with them is an organized, guns-blazing, duck-and-weave enterprise that requires hard work, and is no day at the beach. All smart directors go out of their way not to be mean or manipulative, of course, being political animals and all. But deep down they have to be that snarly John Ford guy, or the system will eat them up.

There are always welcome exceptions to any rule, but the general rule is that there’s a linkage between directors getting older and becoming nicer, mellower people and their films starting to go down in quality.

The question is not which good directors have SOB undercurrents (answer: all of them) but which directors have a reputation for perhaps being too mellow and easygoing and accommodating, and are therefore probably doomed to be weeded out of the business sooner or later?

A thoroughly adolescent, borderline-retarded thought flashed through my head a while ago, to wit: I’d be far more interested in seeing Guillermo Del Toro‘s Pacific Rim if it was re-titled Pacific Rim Job. A joke for sixth-graders, okay, but I felt an agreeable surge when it hit me. Yes! Better title! But why?

In fact my reasons for entertaining this dopey-sounding thought are entirely reasonable.

One, a consensus is building in the blogosphere that Joe Cornish‘s Attack The Block has exposed the utter worthlessness of spending mountains of money on CG monsters by reminding us that it’s the victims of the monsters (their lives, issues, thematic currents, fears) are what matter most, and in fact are the only things that matter.

Two, the ludicrous CG alien craft in the trailer for Peter Berg‘s Battleship made me sick, and convinced me all the more that Cornish’s film is a breath of fresh air and may in fact represent a kind of nouvelle vague in monster films. It certainly revives a George Romero-ish feeling and reiterates what’s best in this genre.

And three, Guillermo del Toro declared during last weekend’s ComicCon that he feels duty-bound “to film the finest fucking monsters ever committed to the screen, and the greatest fucking robots.” The instant I heard that I said to myself, “Who cares? Monsters are over. They’ve been over-created! And your duty, Guillermo, is to engage and move your audience like you did in Pan’s Labrynth, Chronos and The Devil’s Backbone…okay?”

Which is why if given a choice between Pacific Rim and Pacific Rim Job, I would definitely prefer the latter.

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.