Day: August 24, 2012

Nine people were reportedly hit this morning by NYPD friendly fire. You’d never know it to watch this security-cam video. The shooter goes down in a sort of lame-ass way. “Oh, I’ve been shot two or three times!…well, I guess I’d better collapse on the sidewalk and roll over and die.” A Hollywood action director would never stand for anything this rote.

It’s believed in some quarters that Liz Garbus‘s Love, Marilyn, a doc that focuses on a trove of Monroe’s private writings and musings that were discovered a year or two ago, will have its first-anywhere public showing at the Telluride Film Festival before moving on to Toronto. Garbus enlisted several big-name actors (Viola Davis, Glenn Close, Uma Thurman, Lindsay Lohan, Paul Giamatti, Adrien Brody, Marisa Tomei) to voice Monroe’s thoughts and jottings.

Taken two days ago at outdoor Westwood mortuary where Monroe’s remains lie. Her tomb is exactly like Oscar Wilde’s in Pere Lachaise in Paris — covered with lipstick kisses.

When I saw Butter last year at the 2011 Telluride Film Festival “there were laughs from time to time but my general impression was that audience energy levels eventually turned flat. Because after the first 25 or 30 minutes it was clear that the filmmakers weren’t interested in investing any real human truth or honest emotional underpinnings to any of the characters — with one or two exceptions they’re all playing exaggerated satirical types. And worked-out, semi-logical motivations are few and far between.

“I would love to have fun with a smart comedy that skewers Middle America and Jennifer Garner‘s Michelle Bachmann-like character, but Butter is sloppily written and poorly motivated and simply not a class act.

“Garner’s rightwing bitch is so shrill and constipated and psychopathic that it’s impossible to laugh at or with her after the first half-hour or so. Yara Shahidi , a 10-year-old African-American girl who plays the instigating lead, is the one uncompromised bright note, and is obviously pretty and appealing. Ty Burrell, playing Garner’s hapless, low-key husband, is okay for the most part. But Olivia Wilde‘s stripper character and Hugh Jackman‘s car-salesman doofus are written too crudely and illogically.

“Comedies have to be funny, obviously, but they never work unless they’ve been written and constructed like drama. Once you say, ‘Oh, we’re just making a ‘comedy’ so we can goof off and make fun of this and that and throw reality out the window,’ you’re finished.

“Butter was being compared last night to Michael Ritchie‘s Smile (’75), an admired satire about a teenaged beauty competition in Santa Rosa. Forget it, nowhere near, not even close. [A critic friend] mentioned Alexander Payne‘s Election as another similarity. No way in hell — Butter isn’t remotely in the same league.”

You know what I need? I’ll tell you what I need…seriously. I need a nice long sprawling sequence in a feature film. Perfectly choreographed, five or six minutes without a cut. The opening credits of Touch of Evil, the Copacabana Goodfellas shot….we need one of these every so often. Good for the soul. When was the last one?

You know what I need? I’ll tell you what I need. I need to see a Cameron Crowe movie about a father grappling with his son’s amphetamine addiction. Crowe, a good fellow struggling to re-claim the rep he enjoyed in the mid ’90s to early aughts as a magic-touch director, has been adapting David Sheff‘s “Beautiful Boy: A Father’s Journey Through His Son’s Addiction” and Nic Sheff ‘s “Tweak: Growing Up on Methamphetamines.” Yeah! But first give me root-canal surgery.

I raised a son and he turned out to be a drug addict, a parking-lot attendant, an asshole, a racist, an obese layabout, a wife-beater, a birther, a mass murderer….you name it. Oohh, was it my fault? Gee, I don’t feel so good.

Maybe if Crowe’s film is done the right way it’ll remind some of us of Shawn Ku‘s Beautiful Boy(2010), a drama costarring Michael Sheen and Maria Bello about their son being accused of a mass shooting. Or Lynne Ramsay‘s We Need To Talk About Kevin, a story about the raising of a warlock-eyed Beelzebub who shoots up a bunch of high school kids at the end.

I’ve been officially informed that Greta Gerwig‘s character in Noah Baumbach‘s Frances Ha (a) does not have an Asian stepdad and (b) does not self-adopt an Asian last name out of affection for the films of Wong Kar Wai. The p.r. reps I spoke to yesterday declined to rule out the notion of an Asian influence of some kind, but now they have….fine. As I said yestrday, Frances Ha is expected to play Telluride and will screen in Toronto.

An hour or two ago Mitt Romney let go with a birther ad-lib, obviously calculating that his fans would enjoy it and give him a hand. He was right.

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These alternate versions of the recently released Killing Me Softly one-sheet aren’t perfect, but they’re certainly more intriguing, I feel, from a design and thematic standpoint. Thanks and congrats to HE reader Mark Frenden for submitting these less than an hour ago.

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The rumors about L.A. Times “Hero Complex” columnist Geoff Boucher leaving the paper in the wake of Patrick Goldstein‘s departure are unconfirmed and not necessarily true. But it sure smells like something, given surrounding stories and activities.

I heard yesterday morning that the L.A. Times‘ highly regarded and well-connected movie industry reporter John Horn is “on the market” — i.e., has been making discrete inquiries about another gig. But I called and wrote quite a few people about this (Horn included) and couldn’t shake a single apple or even a leaf from any tree, so I let it go. But when you add this to Goldstein’s exit and the Boucher talk, it certainly feels like “something’s happening here.”

Disgruntled ex-employee starts shooting, drops several people and then shoots himself or goes down from return fire. So commonplace, so “normal” — a thoroughly American way of dealing with stress, rage and unemployment.

And the more it happens, the more likely that the next whackjob will say to himself, “Well, if nothing else works out and if my ex-girlfriend continues to refuse to speak to me, at the very least I can start shooting and go down in a blaze of anger. And at the very least my rage will be visible and palpable and discussed by the media.”

The late Jeffrey Johnson, 53, a former employer of Hazan Import and a designer of women’s accessories, had been let go about a year ago, according to a City Hall spokesperson. The cops took him out on 33rd street soon after he shot his former boss, but not before a brief firefight. Mayor Bloomberg has just stated in an outdoor press conference that one or more onlookers may have been shot by NYPD friendly fire.

“The cold-blooded killer wore a business suit and was carrying a briefcase when he pumped a pair of fatal bullets into his victim near the 33rd St. entrance to the skyscraper, a witness told the Daily News.

“The well-dressed shooter, after casually strolling away from the murder scene, was gunned down within minutes in a…confrontation with the cops.

“There was blood on the sidewalk,” said witness Rebecca Fox. “It was like a scene out of CSI, but it was real. I was literally shaking.” Seven other people were wounded, none too seriously, before the shooting stopped just after 9 a.m.