Day: August 22, 2012

Four or five days ago I did a phoner with Hit and Run producers Kim Waltrip and Jim Casey, who have a company called Kim & Jim Productions. They’re a bit formal and guarded, but nice. Hit and Run opens today with a Rotten Tomatoes hoi polloi rating of 67%. I was mixed on it myself, but I loved the writing. Here’s the mp3.

(l.) Kim Waltrip and (r.) Jim Casey, producers of Hit and Run, co-chairs of Kim & Jim Productions.

“Much of Hit and Run is a very cleverly written, refreshingly original, angular-attitude comedy that reminded me (in the early stages, at least, and in portions throughout) of David O. Russell‘s Flirting With Disaster (’96),” I wrote last week, “and that is high praise indeed. That classic comedy had inspired character flavor, unusual detours and flaky oddball dialogue, and so does Hit and Run. And while this stuff was happening during last night’s premiere screening, I was delighted.”

One of our topics was the fact that Kim is a moderate Republican — far from a crime but certainly a curiosity in this overwhelming liberal industry. In her defense she’s a “green” Republican who believes in conservation and gay marriage and is generally liberal-ish on social issues. I didn’t ask her if she supports Romney-Ryan — that would have been an antagpnistic question under the circumstances.

Nicole Kidman has appeared nude and semi-nude in movies and photo sessions before, and I guess this V magazine spread is some kind of nod to her white-trash character in Lee Daniels‘ The Paperboy. I just don’t get the hair. It’s part sheepdog, part floor mop, part Jane Fonda in Klute.

Monochrome is a good idea, but the crispness of the image is almost a little too Richard Avedon-ish. You know what I would have done? Have the photographer deliver a rustic photo of Daniel Day Lewis‘s Lincoln in the old Matthew Brady style, like a daguerreotype taken in the 1860s.

The normal 21st Century thing is for major newspapers to fire their movie critics, so it feels almost surreal to hear that the Orange Country Register is looking to hire one. I could make several suggestions to editor Ken Brusic, but let’s keep it to one for now: former Arizona Daily Star critic, OK magazine critic, blogger and Twitter guy Phil Villarrreal. Do you have to be a Republican to be considered? Is it realistic to expect to even find more than one or two Republican film critics? Kyle Smith, Michael Medved and who else?

As Hitler videos go, this isn’t half bad. Except the Akin thing will go away within two or three days…okay, a week. And the brainiac who wrote the copy has misspelled “know” and “disappear.” And the Stalin reference makes no sense. But some of it is funny. “We never called Romney a felon…yeah, right.”

This morning I’m a tad more knowledgable about factors that may have led to Patrick Goldstein having taken a buyout from the L.A. Times and shut down his 12 year-old column, “The Big Picture.” A key thing for any working journalist to consider is to think about the amount of content you produced ten years ago, and then ask yourself “would that cut it in today’s media environment?” Ten years ago I was banging out two columns per week for Reel.com, and no, that would not cut it today.

This, I gather, is the crux of the Goldstein exit saga. He wouldn’t agree to grim up, eat more Wheaties and churn out more stuff. He wouldn’t get with the 2012 program.

You could assert that it was unrealistic for anyone who had Goldstein’s gig to run with the mindset of “I’m going to write one column a week and tap out a few blog posts in the margins.” It seemed that more than a few of his columns, boiled down, were basically “I just went to lunch with so and so” along with that “summer movie posse” thing (show kids some trailers) he’s been doing since forever. We all go dry or stale from time to time and need to re-charge, but it did seem as if Goldstein was out of ideas or running low on gas or something along those lines.

There’s also a view with although the L.A. Times is structurally unsound with creaking timbers and financial wolves circling (hence my remark yesterday that it’s “largely a gutted, dying organization”), Calendar, run by John Corrigan, is actually a fairly lively place to be. It’s now employing six movie writer-reporters in hopes of ramping up on that Oscar season ad income. The latest new staffers are Mark Olsen and Glenn Whipp, adding to Rebecca Keegan, Steven Zeitchik, Amy Kaufman and Nicole Sperling. So Goldstein is gone, okay, but new writers, new ideas and new innovations will quickly rush in and take his place.

Last night I saw A Liar’s Autobiography, a 3D animated film about the life of the late Monty Python headliner Graham Chapman (1941 — 1989), based on Chapman’s comedic memoir that was initially published in 1980. No reviews permitted until the beginning of the Toronto Film Festival, but here’s a clip from Chapman’s funeral that worked nicely as I slumped in my seat.

The film, a Bill and Ben Production, uses Chapman’s recording of his autobiography, made shortly before he died of throat (or tonsil) cancer. Produced and directed by London-based Bill Jones, Ben Timlett and Jeff Simpson, the film had several animation companies working on different chapters of varying lengths. ” John Cleese has recorded new dialogue which will be matched with Chapman’s voice, Michael Palin will voice Chapman’s father, Terry Jones will play his mother, Terry Gilliam plays Graham psychiatrist…and they all play various other roles,” says the Wiki page. Eric Idle was apparently the only Monty Python fellow who abstained.