Year: 2011

I’ve been invited to a special 20th anniversary screening tonight of Thelma and Louise at the Academy theatre in Beverly Hills, starting at 7:30 pm. Indiewire‘s Anne Thompson will moderate a q & a with three of the creators — screenwiter Callie Khouri, costar Geena Davis and producer Mimi Polk Gitlin.

It would be cooler if the whole gang showed up, but costar Susan Sarandon and director Ridley Scott are otherwise engaged, I’m told. Ditto costars Brad Pitt, Harvey Keitel and Michael Madsen. And what about that rasta guy who blows pot smoke into the trunk of the car with the cop in it?

This isn’t really a 20th anniversary event, of course, as the film opened on May 24, 1991. And it’s not about the T&L Bluray, which was released early last February.

The famous ending is the only part of this film that I don’t respect. Not the driving off the cliff, but the way the music swells up and Scott goes into a montage showing what a great and spirited pair Thelma and Louse were. If you’re going to send the girls off the cliff, don’t sugercoat it. It’s not some Masada-like triumph — it’s the end, and it’s going to be ghastly. Drive off the cliff with the camera running in the back seat and the Sarandon and Davis dummies in the front seat, and keep filming all the way down until you crash into the rocks below. That would have been amazing and brave.

Last weekend’s Oscar Poker chat got lost in the shuffle. It’s mainly Sasha’s fault for not sending me the link via email. Here’s a non-iTunes, stand-alone link.

The irony of the ABC-vs. Weinstein hassle over the initial red-band trailer for Our Idiot Brother (i.e., the network refusing to air it “unless TWC makes specified cuts”) is that the substitute trailer is much better. Harvey Weinstein‘s official declaration: “We’d like to dedicate [the new trailer] to censorship everywhere…enjoy!”

Paul Rudd‘s hippie fool is a naive, trusting dipshit who’s incapable of understanding that he needs to keep his nose out of the private, ethically challenged and occasionally sordid realms of his family members, and especially not lay judgments or, worse, put them into professionally embarassing positions. The film’s idea is that despite Rudd being a world-class kumquat, his child-like, sweet-natured disposition is a good thing for his sisters and their significant others and/or employers. He lets some air in, etc.

I didn’t believe that to be true and therefore i didn’t find the film very funny…sorry. I hate bearded hippie-dippies who get high every day and wear Crocs. Real-life guys like Rudd’s character are out there, all right, but if I see one coming I generally cross over to the other side of the street.

Our Idiot Brother opens tomorrow, 8.26. Rudd’s costars are Elizabeth Banks, Zooey Deschanel, Emily Mortimer, Steve Coogan, Hugh Dancy, Kathryn Hahn, Rashida Jones, Shirley Knight, T.J. Miller and Adam Scott. Jesse Peretz directed from a screenplay by Evgenia Peretz and David Schisgall.

I suppose this is the best that Star Wars prequel-haters can hope for come September 16th — Episodes #4 through #6 for $39 and change through Amazon Prime. I’ll just throw Return of the Jedi into the dumpster. As God is my witness I’ll never watch that film again.

A guy I know and trust who’s seen David Cronenberg‘s A Dangerous Method is calling it “great, brilliant, precise and lucid,” and that “among all Cronenberg’s films the one it’s closest to is Dead Ringers.”

Oh, and the Ben-Hur restoration that will show at the New York Film festival prior to hitting Bluray “is tremendous,” he says, “so brilliantly clear and sensitively done…the best I’ve ever seen it [look]. And Miklos Rosza‘s score should be heard to maximum effect.”

The Obama campaign is sending out free bumper stickers to the faithful. The maniacal Rick Perry is probably going to win the 2012 Republican nomination for President, and because he’s such a neanderthal-sounding, corporate kowtowing yokel (i.e., the new Greg Stillson), Barack Obama, despite his plummeting poll numbers right now, will eke out a victory…barely. Once Average Joes get a really good look at Perry, a slim majority will suck it in, shake their heads, exhale, hold their nose and vote for Obama. 50.3%…something like that. Maybe 51%.

With only six weeks to go before the 10.7 British 1release, Tyrannosaur director Paddy Considine — “the Terrence Malick of trailer cutting” — has finally delivered a trailer. It lasts 1:52, and conveys the tenderness and the rage with some nice, counter-balancing music. But it under-sells, I feel, the shattering performance by Olivia Colman as a battered wife. I’m serious. Colman and Olivia Spencer and (although I haven’t seen Coriolanus) Vanessa Redgrave — the Best Supporting Actress roster will have to include these three.

“Colman’s performance comes as a revelation,” wrote the Village Voice‘s Nicholas Rapold. Colman “went on a total transformation on this film…she became world-class,” Considine said in Rapold’s piece. Everlasting shame upon each and every SAG member that fails to see Tyrannosaur, at the very least for Colman’s sake.

Most dreams happen during REM sleep, right? Sometime around 4 or 5 am? The ones you tend to remember and write about the next day are the ones that wake you up at this, the hour of the wolf. Within the last two weeks I’ve had two…I might as well call them nightmares. But they were’t nightmares as much as disturbing short films with hateful predatory characters coming in for the kill, and both were about bad stuff that I’ve done coming back to bite me in the ass. Both were so unpleasant that I had to get up and shower and start working in order to flush them out of my head.

The first was a Telluride dream starring a youngish Robert Redford (i.e., how he looked around the time of Electric Horseman), a younger Roger Ebert (talking, heavier, eating and drinking) and, for some inexplicable reason, Richard Attenborough as he looked in the ’60s. Someone had thrown together a Redford career-tribute reel, and yet it wasn’t clips but new surreal footage in which his Hubbell Gardner from The Way We Were had a brief conversation with Jeremiah Johnson, and Bill McKay of The Candidate gave a smile and a pat on the back to Turner from Three Days of the Condor. And then the Horse Whisperer guy stepped in and nodded and waved to the other guys, and so it went. All together and hugging like the people on the beach at the end of The Tree of Life, everyone relaxed and alpha in a kind of Octopussy’s Garden-type way.

And the real Redford was sitting there in this mountain-air, Rocky Mountain environment, watching the tribute with the rest of us. Ebert was sitting at a kind of picnic table with at least two pretty women, and Attenborough was sitting across from Ebert and joking and giggling the whole time, and the vibe was very smooth and soothing — everyone in this Shangrila-like place, far from the madding crowd, etc. And I was saying to myself stuff like “this is awfully nice” and “I’m pretty happy here.”

And then I started to hear from people who were pointing accusatory fingers about stuff that I’d done in the ’70s and ’80s and ’90s but had long since forgotten about — things that I had to answer for. People I’d treated inconsiderately, deadlines I hadn’t met, bills I hadn’t paid, things I’d lost through selfishness or carelessness. No felonious crimes, mind, but they sounded pretty bad when you added them all up. I was guilty and had to pay. It took me about 10 or 15 minutes after I woke up to either re-suppress these demons or come to the gradual realization that I hadn’t really been such a bad guy in the past.

Two and half hours ago I woke up from nightmare #2, which was about about working in some kind of corporate environment in a typical bullshit glass-and-steel building — i.e., the kind of place that was gloriously blown up at the end of Fight Club. And it was basically about my not being very popular with younger co-workers and being accused of not doing stuff that I’d been asked to do and having alcohol on my breath (and in actuality I never touch the stuff, even wine, until the work is entirely done and it’s 9 pm or later) and being plotted against and ganged up on, and eventually being canned. One of the guys who was bitching and against me looked an awful lot like Jeff Sneider (i.e., “TheInsneider”). It was an atmosphere of pure ugliness, pure venality.

The dream reminded me that in most urban business-y work environments, about 40% of everyone’s time and energy goes into gossip and back-biting and the forming of cabals and occasional feverish plottings against this or that person (“Let’s get that guy!), and that maybe 35% goes into creative solution-finding or problem-solving or honest hard work and real-deal accomplishment, and that the other 25% is about lunch and coffee breaks and goofing off. Hell is other people. Hell is living with the daily fear of being fired. Hell is friendly-but-chilly guys like Jack Kelly, who was my bureau chief at People. I’ve been a stressed but relatively happy soul since I began working on my own as a columnist in 1994 (for the L.A. Times Syndicate) and particularly as an online guy, beginning in ’98.

Everyone understands there are two Undefeated films out there, right? One is a piece of hagiography about Sarah Palin that you can throw in the dumpster (it’s only made a lousy $100,000 since opening in mid-July), and the other is really, really good. I’ve just seen the latter, a deeply touching 90-minute doc about Memphis’s Manassas Tigers, an African-American high-school football team trying to up their wins. But it’s mainly about various team members toughing it out with personal struggles. And it really sinks in.

The Undefeated gang at Austin’s SXSW film festival in mid March 2011.

The first half of Dan Lindsay and TJ Martin‘s film is somewhere between good enough and not bad — very nicely shot & smoothly cut but still a familiar portrait of a rural underdog football team. Seen it before. But the second half…whoa. That’s when all the threads pay off and the seeds sprout, and it really gets you. I started to choke up a bit during one scene, but I coughed and kept it in check. “Shit…this is affecting,” I said to myself.

The life of the party is Bill Courtney, a dogged, red-haired lumber mill owner who donates his time as coach of the Tigers. He’s really quite an educator and an orator and an inspirational father to his players. He really gets into their lives and gets them to deal with their temporary setbacks, foibles, challenges.

The main “characters” are “Money” Brown, a right tackle who suffers a torn ligament halfway through his senior season. An angry junior named Chavis Daniels who did time in a youth jail during his sophomore year. And O.C. Brown, a 280-pounder (he reminds you of the kid in The Blind Side) who has the best shot at a college football scholarship but who has problems getting decent grades.

It’s basically a slice of a real-life Blind Side (as far as O.C. is concerned) mixed in with Peter Berg‘s Friday Night Lights but without the wackjob parents.

It even ends on a similar note to Berg’s film. It isn’t the winning or the losing, but how you play the game and whether or not you’ve given your all and stood tall in a proud way, etc. The doc isn’t really about football as much as character, intestinal fortitude, manning up, etc. And caring, really caring. Put a little love in your heart.

I missed this morning’s screening of Ralph Fiennes‘ Coriolanus, but at the 1 pm Undefeated screening two seasoned critics raved about Vanessa Redgrave‘s performance as Volumnia, the mother of Fiennes’ titular character. Add Guy Lodge’s Berlin Film Festival rave and there doesn’t seem to be much doubt about Redgrave being a top contender for a Best Supporting Actress nomination.

My Week With Marilyn (Weinstein Co., 11.4) “belongs to Michelle Williams and she alone. That is all anyone will be talking about once people actually see the movie. There is absolutely, positively no doubt that Williams is right alongside Meryl Streep and Glenn Close at the very front of the Best Actress race.” — quote from smart, well-connected guy who’s seen it, quoted on 8.15.

Set in 1914 or thereabouts, David Cronenberg‘s A Dangerous Method (Sony Classics, 11.23) is about a kind of perverse relationship between the young Carl Jung (Michael Fassbender), his mentor Sigmund Freud (Viggo Mortensen), and Sabina Spielrein (Keira Knightley), a lady with “issues,” as we would say today. But if I didn’t know the background and was just strolling around a theatre lobby in an orange T-shirt and cutoffs with a pot belly and big tub of popcorn, I’d be presuming that Knightley is playing a ghost of some kind…right?