If I was casting Fox Searchlight’s Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho, I would never choose the buxom, thick-lipped Scarlet Johansson to play the thin-lipped, somewhat rigid-mannered Janet Leigh, as announced earlier today in a Variety story.
There’s a reason Leigh was a star from the early ’50s to early ’60s — it was a generally uptight, conformist, buttoned-down era, and Leigh’s cautious look and vibe fit right into that. She wasn’t Anna Magnani or Sophia Loren or Gloria Grahame. She was large-boobed, but she was basically Miss (or Mrs.) White Picket Fence. Her face didn’t move a muscle in The Vikings.
And if Johansson had been time-machined back to the early ’50s she would have never made it as a big-league actress. At best she would have been the tart, the cigarette girl — Barbara Nichols in Sweet Smell of Success. Conversely Leigh probably wouldn’t have found much success if she’d begun in the mid to late ’90s. Correct and cautious wouldn’t have made it in the Bill Clinton-Monica Lewinsky blowjob era.
In Sam Kashner‘s Vanity Fair piece about The Sopranos (“The Family Hour: An Oral History of The Sopranos“), he reports that David Chase‘s first feature, about a rock band in ’60s New Jersey, is called Not Fade Away. A month ago Variety‘s Dave McNaryreported that the film, costarring James Gandolfini and John Magaro, was being called The Twylight Zones — an awful title. I’m presuming Kashner’s is the correct one. Paramount Vantage will release the film sometime next fall.
On page 156 and 157 of Vanity Fair‘s current issue portrait photos of the Dark Shadows cast — Johnny Depp, Eva Green, Michelle Pfeiffer, Helena Bonham Carter — appear. Warner Bros. will open Tim Burton ‘s vampire film on 5.11.
Wiki synopsis: “In 1752, the Collins family sails from Liverpool, England to North America. The son, Barnabas (Depp), grows up to be a wealthy playboy in Collinsport, Maine and is the master of Collinwood Manor. He breaks the heart of a witch, Angelique Bouchard Green), who turns him into a vampire and buries him alive. In 1972, Barnabas is accidentally freed from his coffin and returns to find his once-magnificent manor in ruin. It is occupied by dysfunctional Collins descendants (Pfeiffer playing Elizabeth Collins0 and other residents, all of whom have secrets.”
Jonny Lee Miller costars as Roger Collins, Elizabeth’s brother. Chloe Moretz as Carolyn Stoddard, Elizabeth’s rebellious teenage daughter. And Helena Bonham Carter plays Dr. Julia Hoffman, Elizabeth’s hired live-in psychiatrist.
I finally saw Chris Kentis and Laura Lau‘s Silent House (Open Road, 3.9) last night, having missed it at Sundance 2011. I also managed to miss Gustavo Hernandez‘s Uruguyan original, which the Kentis-Lau version is a remake of, at the Director’s Fortnight section of the 2010 Cannes Film Festival.
My son Dylan didn’t care for the final third and I, too, had issues with this portion, which wanders into Johnny Favorite territory. But the single-take “real time” aspect — it gives the impression of being one continual 88-minute hand-held shot — won me over as an exercise alone. On top of which Kentis-Lau are trying to revive the creepy-scary Repulsion vibe — showing very little, relying mainly on sounds, forcing the imagination to do the work. This alone puts Silent House heads and shoulders above most horror pics. So at the very least I applaud the effort even if I found some of the action and payoff material bothersome and misleading.
Elizabeth Olsen totally carries the film as Sara, the terrorized lead. Her costars (Adam Trese, Eric Sheffer Stevens, Julia Taylor Ross, Haley Murphy) aren’t given a chance to do anything that might stick in your mind, at least from a performance standpoint.
The most noteworthy “real time” films in my book are Rope (’48), The Set-Up (’49), High Noon (’52), 12 Angry Men (’57), Nick of Time (’95), Run Lola Run (’98), Phone Booth (’03), Before Sunset (’04), The Death of Mr. Lazarescu (’05) and United 93 (’06). Wait, didn’t United 93 go in for a little compression here and there?
The new Universal Pictures’ animated earth-logo intro is a vast improvement over the yellowish earth lesion version they’ve been running with for the last ten or twelve years. (I was actually disinvited from Universal screenings three or four years ago for complaining about this.) The darker, bluer tones in the Centennial celebration version are extremely handsome and clean.
Tiny Furniture sprawled…writ large. Drop 30 pounds and 75% of the series loses its narrative propellant. I agree that Lena Dunham is essential to the conversation and to 2012 hip film culture, but she needs to do a Jonah Hill and see where she stands without the weight.
Obviously there’s a reason why Andrew Breitbart, the youngish, often steamed-up conservative commentator-blogger with three websites and four kids, died just after midnight this morning at age 43. Guys his age just don’t keel over, and so “natural causes” — the explanation given — doesn’t cut it. Update: Probably a heart attack.
“Andrew left four beautiful children, a beautiful wife and extended family,” Ebner replied. “He didn’t smoke or do drugs, if that’s what you’re thinking. He was generous with his family, his friends and, of course, the media. Was he not? He had a big heart, and I guess his heart was just too big for this world.”
“C’mon, Mark…what happened?”
“That’s my statement Jeff,” Ebner replied. “Use it or not. ”
The Guardian‘s Karen McVeigh has reported that Breitbart “was walking near his house in the Brentwood neighborhood shortly after midnight Thursday when he collapsed, his father-in-law Orson Bean said. Someone saw him fall and called paramedics, who tried to revive him. They rushed him to the emergency room at UCLA Medical Center, Bean said.
“Breitbart had suffered heart problems a year earlier, but Bean said he could not pinpoint what happened.”
A loather of all things leftie, a rabid despiser of the Occupy movement and a Tea Party cheerleader, Breitbart was irksome — okay, infuriating — but never boring. He had a hearty laugh and a beaming smile, and he had one of those swaggering, life-gulping attitudes or personalities that you sometimes run into or read about in novels.
I knew of Brietbart for years as Matt Drudge‘s guy, my relationship with Drudge reaching back to ’97 (or was it ’96?). I first ran into him at an LA party for “Hollywood Interrupted.” I next spoke with him at a Laurel Canyon party around the time that the Huffington Post was being assembled. Breitbart helped in the launching of that site. (Arianna Huffington was at that party also.)
Breitbart launched Breitbart.com in 2005, and then three “subsites,” including BigHollywood.com and BigGovernment.com.
The following statement was posted on Breitbart’s website today: “With a terrible feeling of pain and loss we announce the passing of Andrew Breitbart. We have lost a husband, a father, a son, a brother, a dear friend, a patriot and a happy warrior. Andrew lived boldly, so that we more timid souls would dare to live freely and fully, and fight for the fragile liberty he showed us how to love. ”
Breitbart stepped into it two years ago when Shirley Sherrod filed a defamation suit against him, alleging that a hair-trigger assessment had caused her firing from the Agriculture Department by the Obama administration.
According to a 2010 L.A. Times profile by Robin Abcarian, Breitbart “lived in Westwood with his wife, Susie, and their four young children. He was adopted by moderately conservative Jewish parents and attended two of L.A.’s most exclusive private schools — Carlthorp and Brentwood. He had a n office on Sawtelle Blvd.
“His father, Gerald, owned Fox and Hounds, a landmark Tudor-style Santa Monica restaurant that later became the punk rock club Madame Wong’s West. His mother, Arlene, was an executive for Bank of America in Beverly Hills and downtown L.A.”
43 year-old guys with a wife, four kids and a thriving business don’t just collapse and die. Not even ones with heart conditions, in my experience. 43 is way too young, doesn’t add up.
Joss Wheedon‘s The Avengers opens in less than four months and Disney marketing chose to limit their Super Bowl spot…oh, I get it. This is a ten-second tease for a trailer that will debut during the game. I still maintain that Wheedon is a lightweight (i.e., moderately talented) clock-puncher and journeyman, and nowhere near the realm of James Cameron or Bryan Singer even. Here’s the most recent trailer.
Last Sunday I wrote that facial stubble was mandatory for lead actors in Sundance 2012 films, and that “every single actor in every single film I saw in Park City complied.” The mandate also includes mainstream cinema, as this still from Skyfall, the latest 007 installment, makes clear. Daniel Craig‘s James Bond was absolutely clean-shaven in Casino Royale, but I can’t recall if he wore GQ stubble in Quantum of Solace.
