Month: April 2012

Variety‘s Jeff Sneider is reporting that Taylor Swift, of all people, is “circling the role” of Joni Mitchell in a film version of Sheila Weller‘s 2008 book “Girls Like Us,” which will be shot under the aegis of Sony Pictures and Di Bonaventura Pictures. It’s an appalling idea because Mitchell’s manner and speaking style always conveyed the churning soul of a poet and artist, and Swift, a country music aficionado, looks and talks like a none-too-introspective, looking-to-please pop personality. Mitchell is a world-class lady with oceans, rivers and tributaries within; Swift is a pond.

The director will be Katie Jacobs and the script is by John Sayles.

Like the book, the film “would examine the careers of singers Mitchell, Carly Simon and Carole King,” Sneider reports. “Swift does not have an official offer, but has been linked to the Mitchell role for several months as other actresses have auditioned to play Simon and King, including Alison Pill (Midnight in Paris) for the latter singer. Pic has not yet been greenlit, though it is tentatively skedded to start production later this year when the three leads’ schedules allow for filming.”

Swift has never played a lead or carried a film before. Her two movie appearances thus far have been as a fictional character in Valentine’s Day and as herself in Hannah Montana: The Movie.

Look at Swift in the above video and try to imagine her singing “Coyote” or “Amelia” with with any believability or conviction, much less playing the woman who wrote these songs. Get the fuck outta here.

Meryl Streep of 20 or 30 years ago, okay, but it’s impossible to imagine Swift portraying Mitchell as she’s described by reader Kevin Killian in this Amazon review of the book:

“Joni Mitchell isn’t sympathetic per se, but she has the integrated personality of a genius totally in love with herself and obsessed with her own reflection, so she’s great in a special way. Weller pokes amused fun at Mitchell’s vanity and enormous self-esteem, but we get the picture that, in her opinion at any rate, Mitchell actually is pretty fucking amazing.”

Woody Allen‘s To Rome With Love opened in Italy today, and NPR’s Sylvia Poggioli reports that Italian critics have shown “no love” for it. “Allen is a cult figure here, but reviews of his newest movie were lukewarm — nowhere near the charm, critics said, of last year’s Midnight in Paris. Critics called the movie superficial, banal and full of stereotypes, and said it lacks the irony and scathing satire present in most Italian postwar cinema.

“Several complained that Allen’s Rome is the one foreigners have in their mind’s eye even before setting foot here. And it’s a vision filtered through the prism of the 1 percent — the characters lodge in grandiose baroque-style rooms in five-star hotels and enjoy grand vistas from terraces the average Roman can only dream about.

“Paolo d’Agostini of La Repubblica quipped, ‘Can you imagine a Roman traffic cop living in an apartment overlooking the Spanish Steps?'”

The fact that Allen’s film has been dubbed (the lingua originale version is completely unavailable even in upscale Roman venues) probably diminishes some of the charm.

“The movie is a magnificent postcard of the eternal city,” Poggioli writes, “a carefree romp along cobblestone streets nestled between ancient ruins and Renaissance palaces. A soft yellow glow pervades every scene. It projects an image of the sweet life with all the charms under the Italian sun, set to the tune of old standbys like ‘Volare’ and ‘Arrivederci Roma.’

“Allen has said he grew up watching Italian cinema and was influenced by its grand masters. While there’s nothing neorealist in his latest movie, it has an echo of Fellini‘s The White Sheik, and Penelope Cruz‘s performance in one segment calls to mind Sofia Loren’s high-end call girl in Vittorio de Sica‘s Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow.

“The movie is made up of four separate vignettes about love swaps, mistaken identities and the cult of celebrity. One features Allen himself playing a retired, neurotic opera director who tries to make a star out of a man who can sing Pavarotti-quality opera, but only in his shower.

“In another episode, Alec Baldwin plays a famous architect vacationing in Rome, reminiscing about his youth in the city. Along the way, he meets a young American student, played by Jesse Eisenberg, who is love-struck by Ellen Page, playing a narcissistic young actress.”

The English-language version of To Rome With Love opens in the U.S. on June 22nd.

I was stunned and heartbroken by Google’s decision earlier this year to shut down Picnic, a photo-editing website that was clean and efficient and dumb enough for the likes of myself. There are various website and app options out there, but I needed a cropping, resizing, sharpening, tinting and contrasting tool that was really and truly moron-level. I wrote in early February that “it’s unconscionable of Google to remove a popular photo-editing software without offering some kind of replacement option.”

Well, Google or somebody heard the cries. Picnic ended this morning but there was a link to a site called Picmonkey, and it’s the best photo editing site for dumbasses that I’ve been able to find. I don’t know who created it or why I couldn’t locate Picmonkey until now, but thank God there’s a first-rate Picnic replacement that I can live and work with without breaking a sweat.

“If Hollywood is high school with money, Washington is high school with power,” writes New York‘s Matt Zoller Seitz in his 4.15 review of Veep, the HBO comedy starring Julia Louis-Dreyfus as Selina Meyer, the vice-president of the United States, from British writer-producer Armando Iannucci.

“All of the characters are overgrown adolescents — bitchy, pouty, and narcissistic. And as it happens, they’re employed in a field that equals showbiz in its immaturity, treachery, and obsession with surfaces.”

Yeah…and? Pretty much anyone with a life and a job and a semi-palatable reputation has learned to act and communicate like an adult. But high-school attitudes and arrested adolescence are bigger factors in the human undercurrent than some of us like to admit. Emotional cruelty and shallow judgments and clannish cliques are inescapable. This is what I love about Ianucci’s humor. It squats right down into the sandbox.

“At times the series feels like a live-action version of Doonesbury,” Seitz says, “but minus the sociopolitical context, and with baroque profanity and scatological metaphors. ‘If you can get a Senate-­reform bill through the place it’s designed to reform,’ a senator says, ‘that would be like persuading a guy to fist himself!'” That’s a pretty good line, I think.

“The world can always use one more amusing sitcom, but for all its madcap goofiness, Veep doesn’t say or add up to much — which, in a way, suggests it’s the right satire for a political era marked by stupid feuds, inertia, and superficiality.”

Shades of caveat emptor: I haven’t seen any Veep episodes and for all I know Seitz’s opinion is dead-on, but I’m a huge In The Loop fan, and I suspect that MZS, due respect, is not a guy who really gets or relishes smart-ass but skin-deep adolescent vulgarity as manifested in adults. He’s a fine fellow and an excellent writer but he has too much of an allegiance to quality and profound metaphors and compositional beauty and artful brushstrokes and thematic depth to really get into somewhat shallow material about small-minded government types and their little fucking games. He seems to lack a natural affinity and appetite for casually cruel cynicism.

The above headline is probably accurate to a large extent, although I’m sure it doesn’t fully explain why Walt Disney Studios chairman Rich Ross has been whacked. Deadline‘s Nikki Finke has declared that Ross “was fired — make no mistake about it.” Ross inherited John Carter, but he presided over the marketing and whatnot, and somebody, apparently, had to take the fall for the $200 million loss incurred by the Ishtar of fantasy space epics. (The headline is a nod to a famous Variety headline that ran when Frank Price lost his job at Universal following the titanic failure of Howard The Duck — i.e., “Duck Cooks Price’s Goose.”)

There are three pieces of significant information contained in the Vulture-exclusive, Bob Balaban-narrated clip promoting Wes Anderson‘s Moonrise Kingdom. One, the action (young love, Boy Scout troop, the usual Anderson eccentrics doing the deadpan thing) takes place on a small island called New Penzance, obviously an allusion to Gilbert & Sullivan’s The Pirates of Penzance. Two, the film is set in early September, 1965, or three months before the release of Rubber Soul. And three, a “well-documented storm” that will “strike in three days time” occurs, presumably in the third act.

Except the parts about late summer/early fall 1965 setting and the big storm a’brewin’ were revealed months ago so I guess the only stands-outs are New Penzance and Rubber Soul. (I’m not claiming that this famous Beatles album is referenced in Moonrise Kingdom in any specific way, but if you know anything about Anderson’s musical tastes and soundtrack implementations, you know that Rubber Soul is more than just an album — it’s a mood dream and a state of mind that is very much woven into 1965 as well as 2012.)

Moonrise Kingdom will premiere in Cannes on 5.16, and then open stateside on 5.25. It costars Jared Gilman, Kara Hayward, Bruce Willis, Marc Rizzo, Edward Norton, Bill Murray, Frances McDormand, Tilda Swinton, Jason Schwartzman, Balaban snd Harvey Keitel.

A slightly longer, more atmospheric Spanish-language teaser trailer for Juan Antonio Bayona‘s The Impossible (Summit/Lionsgate, 10.11) has popped up. Longer than the one that posted on 12.27.11, I mean. It’s time for an English-language version, I think.

Last August I passed along information about The Impossible straight from Bayona.

“I can only say that we’re on schedule and working really hard on the editing and visual effects. We finished principal photography last February [2011] and did three weeks of technical shooting (scale models and water) in June. The film will be completed in early 2012.”

Summit acquired domestic rights in May 2010, which means Lionsgate has them now.

The Impossible is a true account of a family swept up in the tsunami that slammed into the coast of Thailand and neighboring countries seven-plus years ago. Naomi Watts and Ewan Macgregor are the stars. Geraldine Chaplin, Tom Holland, Gitte Julsrud and Marta Etura costar.

Bayona’s last film, The Orphanage, is one of the great adult horror films of the 21st Century. The same team that worked on The Orphanage (writer, production manager, cinematographer, composer and editor) have reunited for this.

The Impossible was largely shot in Alicante, Spain and on location in Phuket, Thailand, beginning in the vicinity of May 2010. Post-production came to a close a month or so ago (or something like that).

My heart lifted when I read that Bayona had described it as an “ambitious, high-quality European film” which will be “competitive on an international market.” In other words, not made for American mall idiots.

“Marvel’s cinematic master plan for its comicbook all-stars pays off in extravagant fashion with The Avengers. Like a superior, state-of-the-art model built from reconstituted parts, Joss Whedon‘s buoyant, witty and robustly entertaining superhero smash-up is escapism of a sophisticated order, boasting a tonal assurance and rich reserves of humor that offset the potentially lumbering and unavoidably formulaic aspects of this 143-minute team-origin story.” — from Justin Chang’s Variety review, posted this evening at 9 pm.

I was informed earlier today by a Universal executive that my complaint about the appearance of Alfred Hitchcock‘s Vertigo at last Friday night’s TCM Classic Film Festival screening was “right” — accurate — and that the reason for the film’s poor appearance was a technical glitch. Somebody miscalculated and pushed the wrong button or entered the wrong code when the restored version of Hitchcock’s classic was scanned for a DCP, the exec confessed. Simple human error. It happens.

I thanked the executive for telling me this as I was starting to ask myself why no one else had complained. It was very comforting to hear that I wasn’t wrong. And it was admirable of Universal to admit to a mistake, I thought. I was also informed that Vertigo is currently undergoing preparation for a restored Bluray version, which will hit the market sometime later this year. I’ve heard from an off-the-lot source that a Rear Window Bluray is also being prepared.

Water finds its own level, and to my way of thinking director Francis Lawrence (I Am Legend, Water for Elephants), a middle-range craftsman and hired gun who knows how to make things look good and deliver a generic studio film in a straight-ahead, highly competent way, is a perfect choice to direct Catching Fire, Lionsgate’s sequel to The Hunger Games.

I don’t know anything but what I’ve read and seen in screenings, but Lawrence doesn’t appear to be too exacting or auteurist in his thinking or technique (unlike, say, the great Bennett Miller, who is way, way above the level of director Lionsgate needed to find). Lawrence strikes me as an adapter and a go-alonger, and Lionsgate producers will be able to work with him or…you know, push him around to some extent. No, I didn’t mean that. What I mean is that Lionsgate will adapt to Lawrence and he will adapt to them.

TheWrap‘s Tim Kenneally reported earlier today that
Lionsgate “is preparing to make an offer to Lawrence,” etc.

Levon Helm, the 71 year-old Band drummer-singer who died today in Manhattan, was one of my all-time favorite drummers. He was a kind of personal hero. I used to drum in a couple of garage-style blues bands and I half-modelled my style on his. Helm’s snare-drum and tom-tom hits were spare and minimalist — as far from flamboyant as could be imagined — but they felt just right and dependable and mathematically dead-on.

“In Mr. Helm’s drumming, muscle, swing, economy and finesse were inseparably merged,” N.Y. Times critic Jon Pareles wrote in Helm’s obit. “He gave his drums a muffled, bottom-heavy sound that placed them in the foundation of the [Band’s] arrangements, and his tom-toms were tuned so that their pitch would bend downward as the tone faded. Mr. Helm didn’t call attention to himself.”

And I loved his yokelish, back-country voice. If I’m not mistaken, Helm is the principal vocalist on “Jemima Surrender” and “Rockin’ Chair.”

I remember thinking when I saw Helm play Sissy Spacek‘s coal-miner dad in Michael Aoted‘s Coal Miner’s Daughter (’80) that he looked quite weathered for his years. He was right around 40 at the time, and he looked to be in his late ’50s or early 60s. Maybe it was just makeup.

Yesterday Gordon and the Whale‘s Joshua Brunsting passed along a clear implication in Criterion’s latest newsletter that a Bluray of Roman Polanski‘s Rosemary’s Baby is indeed on the way from that connoisseur-cultivating company. I’ve mentioned this before and I don’t want to harp on it, but let’s just hope and pray that Criterion doesn’t try to crop this thing at 1.78 or 1.85.

“Pierced ears and piercing eyes” — Maurice Evans’ Hutch describing Sidney Blackmer’s Roman Castevet in Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby.

My hunch is that this could happen, even though there are ample indications that this 1968 film plays best at 1.66 and that Polanski intended it to be seen that way.

Criterion had better watch it, that’s all. They’d better think twice and perhaps a third time if they’re thinking of whacking it down to 1.78 or worse. Because if they do we’ll be looking at the equivalent of an all-out Vietcong guerilla war. Constant sniping and derision, Occupy Criterion, speeches and petitions in Union Square, etc.