Day: May 9, 2012

I haven’t read Will Beall‘s screenplay (which is based on Paul Leiberman‘s 2008 seven-part L.A. Times series titled “L.A. Noir: Tales From The Gangster Squad”), but the just-released trailer for Ruben Fleischer‘s The Gangster Squad (Warner Bros., 10.19) indicates a fairly fast and loose approach to facts a la Brian DePalma‘s The Untouchables (’87).

It’s being sold as a “get Mickey Cohen” movie in the same way The Untouchables was a “get Al Capone” flick. But just as the real-life Eliot Ness was portrayed as having made noise and gotten tough with Al Capone, in real life he pretty much stood by while the feds nailed the Chicago gangster tor tax evasion. Likewise the real-life Gangster Squad, led by John O’Mara (Josh Brolin in the film) and Sgt. Jerry Wooters (Ryan Gosling, ditto), never killed or jailed or put legendary L.A. gangster Mickey Cohen (Sean Penn) out of business. They mostly seem to have messed with his operations to some extent, or otherwise harassed and irritated. But that was it.

Like Capone, Cohen did time for tax evasion. Two stretches, in fact — one from the early to mid ’50s and the second from ’61 through ’72. The real-life Gangster Squad may or may not have played a role in helping to put Cohen in jail for the first tax-evasion rap, but so far I haven’t read, learned or been told that. (I had a chat yesterday with Tere Tereba, author of “Mickey Cohen: The Life and Times of L.A.’s Notorious Mobster,” and she didn’t seem persuaded that the Gangster Squad had that much to do with it.)

“During the 1979 Iran hostage crisis, the United States and Canada partnered to rescue six U.S. foreign service members who had evaded the hostage-taking at the takeover of the American embassy in Iran,” says the Wiki page. “The governments were able to convince Iran that the six hostages were members of a film crew who were scouting the area for a movie titled Argo. The hostages were able to escape the country under their fake identities.”

Directed by Ben Affleck; produced by Affleck, George Clooney, Grant Heslov. Starring Affleck, Bryan Cranston, Clea DuVall, John Goodman, Michael Parks, Taylor Schilling, Kyle Chandler. Cinematography: Rodrigo Prieto. Warner Bros. will open domestically on 9.14.12.

Kanstrasse, heading east on scooter — Wednesday, 5.10, 5:05 pm.

Dark Shadows starts tomorrow in Berlin. Because Warner Bros. declined to screen it for me in NYC, I have to see an English-language version commercially tomorrow afternoon at the Potsdamer Sony plex .

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In an inwardly directed q & a, New York‘s Frank Rich has addressed conventional wisdom concerns that President Obama‘s history-making announcement that he supports gay marriage could hurt him in an election year when he needs to win swing states like North Carolina. “That’s always been the rationale for Obama’s dawdling,” he writes. “Don’t rock the boat in North Carolina — or Florida or Virginia or Colorado — by speaking out on gay marriage until after November 6 has passed.

“The counter-argument I’d make is that Obama looked like a phony and a coward each day he fudged this issue, and that his taking a strong and principled stand will have a halo effect on his leadership in general, including among voters who are ambivalent about gay marriage or opposed to it. Just look at Andrew Cuomo, whose approval rating remains high upstate and among Republicans, not just among liberals in New York City and its suburbs.

As for the threat that Mittens Romney will now an issue out of Obama’s conversion, Rich writes, “Just let him try. The real political issue for Romney as he tries to attract centrist voters in a general election is if he can avoid being tainted by the homophobes he pals around with.

“Last week, Romney let the religious right drive away his openly gay foreign-policy spokesman Richard Grenell before he even started the job. More embarrassing still, it wasn’t the once-powerful religious-right big guns, the Robertson-Falwell-Dobson types, who put Romney on the run, but Bryan Fischer, a crackpot bigot who hates Mormons as much as he does gays.

“Then again, Romney couldn’t stand up to Rush Limbaugh when he called Sandra Fluke a ‘slut’ or, this week, to that boisterous supporter at an Ohio rally who called for Obama to be tried for treason.”

With Stephen J. Rivele and Christopher Wilkinson (Ali, Nixon) having rewritten Peter Morgan‘s screenplay of a long-discussed, long-developed Freddy Mercury biopic to which Sacha Baron Cohen is attached to star and co-produce, Cohen and producer Graham King are after Stephen Frears (The Queen) to direct.

That’s the gist of Jeff Sneider‘s 5.8 Variety story, as far as I can discern. He includes a statement that Baron Cohen’s deal to play Mercury “is expected to close in the coming weeks.” But the Frears aspect seems (a) a wee bit flaky as “negotiations have not yet begun” and (b) a wee bit underwhelming as Frears has been doing a fairly good job of convincing his admirers that he may not be the same guy who directed Prick Up Your Ears, The Hit, My Beautiful Laundrette and The Grifters any more, certainly after directing tripe like last year’s Tamara Drewe and the allegedly unexceptional Lay The Favorite (which I missed at last January’s Sundance Film Festival).

The story “focuses on Queen’s formative years and climaxes with the band’s heralded appearance at Live Aid in 1985,” Sneider writes. Translation: SBC’s Mercury won’t waste away and die of AIDS as the film “won’t focus on the singer’s last days.”

The Playlist has reported about Brian DePalma‘s Passion, a remake of the late Alain Corneau’s 2010 French thriller with Rachel McAdams and Noomi Rapace respectively playing the Kristen Scott Thomas and Ludivine Sagnier parts, being “repped” on the Croisette “as one of the myriad films on the block.” Does that mean it’ll be screened or…?

Apat from the intimations of eroticism between Rapace and McAdams, the most striking thing is that McAdams, born in ’78, has been cast in the role of an older, well-established head of a fast-track company which Thomas, born in ’60, played in the Corneau. As McAdams was pretty much a spring chicken when she broke through seven years ago in The Wedding Crashers and The Family Stone, it seems like a stretch to be playing a character inspired by someone like Anna Wintour. This indicates there are other things about DePalma’s version that may seem curious or miscalculated.

McAdams plays Ben Affleck‘s significant interest in Terrence Malick‘s The Burial, which seemed like a fairly likely inclusion at Cannes until Malick did his usual-usual and didn’t submit it.

I wrote the following last summer after seeing Corneau’s original at the 2011 L.A. Film Festival: “Love Crime is an icy, brittle thriller about a corporate power war between a 40something super-exec (Kristin Scott Thomas) and a 30something up-and-comer (Ludivine Sagnier). I’m not spilling details but I do find it strange that a perpetrator of a crime would decide to interrupt his/her career by going to prison, knowing full well that evidence has been planted that will eventually exonerate him/her. Why go through that?”

Marshall Fine has pissed all over Tim Burton and Johnny Depp‘s Dark Shadows, calling it a cousin of Wild Wild West and “as dreary a big-budget extravaganza as you’re likely to see this year. It’s also all the argument you need for staging some sort of couples’ intervention on Depp and Burton. Time to move on and stop enabling this kind of pop-culture junk.

“Big, loud, lavish and flat, Dark Shadows was written by Seth Grahame-Smith, who came up with the one-joke idea of mash-ups blending classic literature and history tales blended with horror-movie tropes, like Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. [Except] all of the jokes in Dark Shadows are DOA. They’re either trite or flat. And the horror? Forget it – too jokey. And the jokes aren’t jokey enough.

“Dark Shadows isn’t the worst movie ever made. It probably won’t even be the worst movie of the year. And that’s the best I can say about it. Watching it is like being told a weak joke that you already know.”

Dwight Garner‘s 5.8 N.Y. Times recap of the life of Maurice Sendak is the best I’ve read since his death was announced yesterday. There isn’t a date on the page that contains this Bill Moyers PBS interview with Sendak, but it looks like it might be roughly ten years old.

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